
Class 
Book 



PRESENTED BY 



yr s'-t?' 



"KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. "-Lord Bacon. 



CAREY AND HART'S 

LIBRARY FOR THE PEOPLE. 

No. 6. 

AN AUTHOR'S MIND; 

"A BOOKFUL OF BOOKS," 

OR 



U 



THIRTY BOOKS IN ONE." 



EDITED BY 



M. F. TUPPEH, ESQ., M. A., 

Author of « Proverbial Philosophy," " The' Crock of Gold," &c. 

COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME. 



PHILADELPHIA: 

CAREY AND HART. 

And for sale by all Booksellers in the United Stales. 

1847. 



Price Thirty-seven and a half Cents. 



VALUABLE WORKS 

Published by CAREY & HART, Philadelphia, 

LIFE OF LORD EL DON. By Horace Twiss. 2 vols. Svo. - - $3 50 

LORD BACON'S WORKS. By Montague. 3 vols. Svo. - - 7 50 

LIFE OF RICHARD III. By C. Halated. 1vol. Svo. - - -150 

LIVES OF VOLTAIRE, ROUSSEAU, &C. By Lord Brougham. 150 

THIERS' FRENCH REVOLUTION. i3Piates 2 vols., cloth, 3 oo 

LORD BOLINGBROKE'S WORKS. Fine edition. 4 vols. - 6 00 

NOCTES AM BROS I AN A. By Professor Wilson. 4 vols. - - 4 00 

MACAULAY'S MISCELLANIES. 5 vols. 5 00 

SYDNEY SMITH'S WORKS. Fine edition. 3vols. ... 3 50 

PATRICK, LOWTH AND WHITBY'S COMMENTA- 
RIES. 4 vols, imperial Svo. 15 00 

LORD BYRON'S WORKS. 6 Engravings. 4 vols. - - - - 4 00 
WAVERLEY NOVELS. Cheap editions. 5 vols. Cloth backs. - - 3 50 
SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH'S MISCELLANIES. - - 175 
POETS AND POETRY OF THE ANCIENTS. By W. Peter, 

Esq. 300 

SCENES IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, OREGON, 
CALIFORNIA, NEW MEXICO, TEXAS AND THE 

GRAND PRAIRIES. With a new Map of Oregon. Cloth Gilt, - 100 

NOTES OF A TRAVELER. By H. Laing, 1 vol. 8vo. - - -175 

OUR ARMY ON THE RIO GRANDE. With 25 Engravings of the 
Battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, &c. &c. By T. B. Thorpe, 1 vol 
ISmo. 50 

TURNER'S HISTORY OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS. 

2 vols. 4 50 

WALTER SCOTT'S WORKS. Complete. 10 vols. Cloth. - io 00 

ROSCOE'S LIFE OF LORENZO DE MEDICI. 2vols. 3 75 

AMERICAN FARMERS' ENCYCLOPEDIA. Plates, - 3 00 

THE LADY OF THE LAKE. Superb edition. 10 Plates, - - 5 00 

LALLA ROOKH. 13 Splendid Engravings, 5 00 

POETS AND POETRY OF AMERICA. ByGriswold, - 3 00 

CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE. Elegantly Illustrated, 3 50 

POETS AND POETRY OF EUROPE. By Longfellow, - 5 00 

LONGFELLOW'S POETICAL WORKS. Superb Plates, - 5 00 

BRYANT'S POEMS. Elegantly Illustrated. 5 00 

LORD JEFFREY'S MISCELLANIES. Svo. Cloth. - - 200 



AN AUTHOR'S MIND: 

THE BOOK OF TITLE-PAGES. ~7J>? 

A BOOKFUL OF BOOKS," OR 'THIRTY BOOKS IN ONE." 



EDITED BY 



M. F. TUPPER, ESQ., M.A., 

AUTHOR OF " PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY," " GERALDINE." i; THE CROCK OF GOLD," 
"THE TWINS," ETC. ETC. 



" En un mot, mes amis, je n'ai entrepris de vous contenter 
tous en general; ainsi, unset autres en particulier; et par 
special, moym A me." Pasquler. 



PHILADELPHIA: 
CAREY AND HART. 

1847. 






PHILADELPHIA : 

T. K. AND P. G. COLLINS, 

PRINTERS. 



ANNOUNCEMENT 

BY THE EDITOR. 



The writer of this strange book (a particular friend of 
mine) came to me a few mornings ago with a very happy 
face, and a very blotty manuscript. " Congratulate me," he 
began, " on having dispersed an armada of headaches 
hitherto invincible, on having exorcised my brain of its 
legionary spectres, and brushed away the swarming thoughts 
that used to persecute my solitude ; I can now lie down as 
calmly as the lamb, and rise as gayly as the lark ; instead of 
a writhing Laocoon my just-found harlequin's wand has 
changed me into infant Hercules brandishing his strangled 
snakes; I have mowed, for the nonce, the docks, mallows, 
hogweed, and wild-parsley of my rank field, and its smooth 
green carpet looks like a rich meadow ; I am free, happy, 
well at ease : argal, an thou lovest me, congratulate." 

Wider and wider still stared out my wonder, to hear my 
usually sober friend so voluble in words, and so profuse oi 
images : I saw at once it was a set speech, prepared for an 
impromptu occasion ; nevertheless, as he was clearly in an 
enviable state of disenthraldom from thoughtfulness, I gra- 



ANNOUNCEMENT. 

ciously accorded him a sympathetic smile. And then this 
more than Gregorian cure for the headache ! here was an 
anodyne infinitely precious to one so brain-feverish as I: had 
all this pleasure and comfort arisen from such common-place 
reraedials as a dear young lover's courtesy or a deceased old 
miser's codicil, I should long ago have heard all about it; 
for, between ourselves, my friend was never known to keep 
a secret. There was evidently more than this in the dis- 
covery ; and when my curiosity, provoked by his laughing 
silence, was naturally enough exhibiting itself in a " What 

on earth -?" he broke out with the abruptness of an 

Abernethy — " Read my book." 

Well, I did read it ; and, in candid disparagement as 
amicably bound, can readily believe what I was told after- 
wards, that, to except a very small portion of older material, 
it had been at chance intervals rapidly thrown off in a cou- 
ple of months, (the old current-quill style,) chiefly with the 
view of relieving a too prolific brain : it appeared to me a 
mere idle overflowing of the brimful mind ; an honest, indeed, 
but often useless exposure of multifarious fancies, — some 
good, some bad, and not a few indifferent ; an incautious 
uncalled-for confession of a thousand thoughts little worth the 
printing, if the very writing were not indeed superfluous. 
Nevertheless, with all its faults, I thought the book a novelty, 
and liked it not the less for its off-hand fashion ; it had some- 
thing of the free, fresh, frank air of an old-school squire at 
Christmastide, suggestive as his misletoe, cheerful as his face, 



ANNOUNCEMENT. 

and careless as his hospitality. Knowing then that my friend 
had been more than once an author, (indeed he tells us so 
himself,) and perceiving from innumerable symptoms that he 
meditated putting also this before the world, I thought kindly 
to anticipate his wishes by proposing its publication : but I 
was rather curtly answered with a " Did I suppose these 
gnats were intended to be shrined in amber ? these mere 
minnows to be treated with the high consideration due only 
to potted char and white bait ? these fleeting thoughts fixed 
in stone before that Gorgon-head the public ? these ephemeral 
fancies dropped into the true elixir of immortality, printer's- 

ink? these " I stopped him, for this other mighty 

mouthful of images betrayed the hypocrite, — M Yes, I did." 
An involuntary smile assured me he did too, and the cause 
proceeded thus : first, a promise not to burn the book ; then 
a Bentley to the rescue, with accessory considerations ; and 
then, the due administration of a little wholesome flattery : 
by this time we had obtained permission, after modest reluct- 
ance pretty well enacted, to transform the deformity of manu- 
script into the well-proportioned elegance of print. But, this 
much gained, our Author would not yield to any argument 
we could urge upon the next point, viz. — leave to produce 
the volume duly fathered with his name: " Not he, indeed ; 
he loved quiet too well ; he might, it was true, secretly like 
the bantling, but cared not to acknowledge it before a popu- 
lous reading-world, every individual whereof esteems him- 
self and herself competent to criticize." Mr. Publisher, 



vi ANNOUNCEMENT. 

deeply disinterested of course, bristled up at the notion of 
anything anonymous ; and the only alternative remaining 
was the stale expedient of an Editor ; that Editor, in brief, 
to be none other than myself, a very palpable-obscure : and 
let this excuse my name upon the title-page. 

Now, as Editor, I have had to do — what seems by the way 
to be regarded by collective wisdom as the best thing possi- 
ble, — nothing: my Author would not suffer the change of a 
syllable, for all his seeming carelessness about the thing, as 
he called it ; so, I had no more for my part than humbly to 
act the Helot, and try to set decently upon the public tables 
a genuine mess of Spartan porridge. 

M. F. T. 

Albubt, Guildford. 



CONTENTS 



The Author's Mind ; a ramble 

Nero ; a tragedy . 

Opium ; a history 

Charlotte Clopton ; a novel 

The Marvelous ; a handbook 

Psychotherion ; an argument 

The Confessional ; a tale 

The Prior of Marrick; an autobiography 

The Seven Churches ; a dissertation 

Revision; an essay 

Homely Expositions ; a compilation 

Lay Sermons ; a contribution 

Scriptural Physics ; a treatise 

Heathenism ; an apology 

Biblical Similes ; an investigation 

Home ; an epic 

Grecian Sayings; a series 

Heptalogia ; a collection . 

Alfred ; an oratorio 

Alfred's Life ; a translation 

National Memorials ; a proposal 

Politics ; a manual 

Woman ; a subject 



Page 
17 

46 

61 

65 

74 

76 

84 

86 

91 

97 

97 

97 

98 

98 

100 

103 

112 

117 

120 

122 

162 

129 

134 



Vlll 



CONTENTS. 



False Steps ; a pamphlet 
King's Evidence; a satire 
Poetics ; a melange 
Humoristics ; a medley- 
Journals ; a decade 
Lay Hints ; an appeal 
Anti-Xurion ; a crusade . 
The Squire ; a portraiture 
The Author's Tribunal ; an oration 
Zoilomastrix ; a title . 
Epilogue ; a conclusion . 
Appendix; an after-thought . 






Page 
139 

140 

144 

150 

153 

155 

160 

165 

170 

178 

178 

180 



• 



AN AUTHOR'S MOD 



THE 



BOOK OF TITLEPAGES 



In these days of universal knowledge, schoolmaster and 
scholars all abroad together, quotation is voted pedantry, and 
to interpret is accounted an impertinence ; yet will I boldly 
proclaim as a mere fact, clear to the perceptions of all it may 
concern, " This book deserves richly of the Sosii." And 
that for the best of reasons : it is not only a book, but a book- 
ful of books; not merely a new book, but a little-library of 
new books; thirty books in one, a very harvest of epitomized 
authorship, the cream of a whole fairy dairy of quiescent 
post-octavos. It is not — mark ye this, my Sosii, (and by 
the way, gentle ladies, these were w 7 orshipful booksellers of 
old, the Murrays and the Bentleys of imperial Rome,) it is not 
the dull concreted elongation of one isolated hackneyed idea, 
— (supposing in every work there be one, a charitable hypothe- 
sis,) — wiredrawn, and coaxed and hammered through three 
regulation volumes; but the scarcely more than hinted ab- 
straction of some forty thousand flitting notions, — hasty yet 
meditative Hamlets, none of those lengthy drawling emblems 
of Laertes, — driven in flocks to the net of the fowler, and 
2 



18 THE AUTHOR'S MIND. 

penned with difficult compression within these modest limits. 
So "goe forth, littel boke," and make thyself a friend among 
those good husbandmen, who tend the trees of knowledge, 
and bring their fruit to the world's market. 

Now, reader, one little preliminary parley with you about 
myself: here beginneth the trouble of Authorship, but it is a 
trouble causing ease; ease from thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, 
which never cease to make one's head ache till they are fixed 
on paper; ease from dreams by night and reveries by day, 
(thronging up in crowds behind, like Deucalion's children, 
or a serried host in front, like Jason's instant army,) harass- 
ing the brain, and struggling for birth, a separate existence, 
a definite life; ease, in a cessation of that continuous internal 
hum of aerial forget-me-nots, clamoring to be recorded. 
happy unimaginable vacancy of mind, to whistle as you 
walk for want of thought! mental holiday, now as im- 
possible to me, as to take a true schoolboy's interest in 
rounders and prisoner's base! An author's mind, — and re- 
member always, friend, I write in character, so judge not as 
egotistic vanity merely the well playing of my role, — such a 
mind is not a sheet of smooth wax, but a magic stone in- 
dented with fluttering inscriptions; no empty tenement, but 
a barn stored to bursting: it is a painful pressure, constrain- 
ing to write for comfort's sake ; an appetite craving to be 
satisfied, as well as a power to be exerted; an impetus that 
longs to get away, rather than a dormant dynamic : thrice 
have I (let me confess it) poured forth the alleviating volume 
as an author, a real author, real, because, for very peace of 
mind, involuntarily; but still the vessel fills; still the indi- 
genous crop springs up, choking a better harvest, seeds of 
foreign growth; still those Lernaean necks sprout again, 
claiming with many mouths to explain, amuse, suggest, and 



A RAMBLE. 19 

controvert, to publish invention, and proscribe error. Truly 
it were enviable to be less apprehensive, less retentive; to 
be fitted with a colander-mind, like that penal cask which 
forty-nine Danaides might not keep from leaking; to be, 
sometimes at least, suffered for a holiday to ramble brainless 
in the paradise of fools. Memory, imagination, zeal, percep- 
tions of men and things, equally with rank and riches, have 
often cost their full price, as many mad have known; they 
take too much out of a man, fret, wear, worry him ; to be irri- 
table is the conditional tax laid of old upon an author's 
intellect; the crowd of internal imagery makes him hasty, 
quick, nervous, as a haunted hunted man: minds of coarser 
web heed not how small a thorn rends one of so delicate a 
texture; they cannot estimate the wish that a duller sword 
were in a tougher scabbard; the river, not content with 
channel and restraining banks, overflows perpetually; the 
extortionate exacting armies of the Ideal and the Causal per- 
secute my spirit, and I would make a patriot stand at once 
to vanquish the invaders of my peace: I write these things 
only to be quit of them, and not to let the crowd increase; 
I have conceived a plan to destroy them all, as Jehu and 
Elijah with the priests of Baal; I feel Malthusian among my 
mental nurselings; a dire resolve has filled me to effect a 
premature destruction of the literary populace superfoetating 
in my brain, — plays, novels, essays, tales, homilies, and 
rhythmicals; for ethics, and poetics, politics, and rhetorics, 
will I display no more mercy than sundry commentators of 
maltreated Aristotle: I will exhibit them in their state cha- 
otic; I will addle the eggs, and the chicken shall not chirp; 
I will reveal, and secrets shall not waste me; I will write, 
and thoughts shall not batten on me. 

The world is too full of books, and I yearn not causelessly 



20 THE AUTHOR'S MIND. 

to add more than this involuntary unit : bottles, bottles, in- 
variable bottles, — was the one idea of a most clever Head 
at Nieder-Selters; books, books, accumulating books press 
upon my conscience in this literary London: despairing 
auctioneers hate the sound, ruined publishers dread it, sur- 
feited readers grumble at it, and the very cheesemonger 
begins to be an epicure as to which grand work is next to be 
demolished. Friendships and loves tremble at the daily 
recurrence of " Have you read this?" and " Mind you buy 
that;" wise men shun a blue-belle, sure that she will recom- 
mend a book ; and the yet wiser treat themselves to solitary 
confinement, that they may not have to meet the last new 
batch of authors, and be obliged to purchase, if not to pe- 
ruse, their never-ending books. I fear to increase the plague, 
to be convicted an abettor of great evils, though by the mea- 
sure of a little one. I am infected, and I know it: but for 
science-sake I break the quarantine, and in my magnanimity 
would be victimized unknown, consigning to a speedy grave 
this useless offspring together with its too productive parent, 
and saving of a race so hopeless little else than their prede- 
termined names, in fact, their Titlepages. 

But is that indeed little? — Speak, authors, with piles of 
ready-written copy, is not the theme (so often carried out 
beyond, or beside, or even against its original purpose), less 
perplexing than the after-thought thesis? bear witness, 
readers, bit by a mysterious advertisement in the Morning 
Post, are names, indeed, not matters of much weight? Press 
forward, Sosii aforesaid, and answer me truly, is not a title- 
page the better part of many books? Cheap promises of stale 
pleasure, false hopes of dull interest, imprimaturs of deceived 
fancy, lying visions of the future unfulfilled, titlepages still 
do good service to the cause of — bookselling. 



A RAMBLE. 21 

And, to commence, let me elucidate mine own, — I mean 
the first, the head and front of this offending phalanx, — mine 
own, par excellence, " An Author's Mind:" such in sooth 
it shall be found, for richer or poorer, for better or for worse ; 
not of selfish, but of common application ; not so much indi- 
vidually of mine own, as generically of authors; a medley 
of crudities; an undigested mass, as any in the maw of 
Polypheme; a fermenting hotchpotch of half-formed things, 
illustrative, among other matters, of the Lucretian theory, 
those close cohering atoms ; a farrago of thoughts, and sys- 
tems of thoughts, in most admired disorder, which would 
symbolize the Corpernican astronomy, with its necessary 
clash of whirling orbs, about as well as the intangible chaos 
of Berkeleyan metaphysics. 

So much then on the moment for the monosyllable u mind ;* 5 
— whereof followeth, indeed, all the more hereafter; but — 
a An Author's?" — what author's: You would see my patent 
of such rank, my commission to wear such honorable uni- 
form. Prythee be content with simple assurance that it is 
so ; consider the charm of unsatisfied curiosity, and pry not ; 
let me sit unseen, a Spectator ; for this once I would go in 
domino. Heretofore, " credit me, fair Discretion, your Affa- 
bility" hath achieved glory, and might Solomonize on its 
vanity at least as well as poor, discomfited, discovered Sir 
Piercie Shafton: heretofore, I have stood forth in good causes 
with helm unbarred, and due proclamation of name, style, 
and title, an avowed author, — and might sermonize thus 
upon success, that a little censure loseth more friends than 
much praise winneth enemies. So now, with vizor down, 
and a white shield, as a young knight-candidate unknown, 
it pleases my leisure to take mv pastime in the tourney: and 
so long as in truthful prowess I bear me gallantly and gently, 



22 THE AUTHOR'S MIND. 

who is he that hath a right to unlatch my helmet, or where is 
the herald that may challenge my rank ? — Nevertheless, in- 
quisitive, consider the mysteries that lie in the Turkish-look- 
ing soubriquet of " Mufti;" its vowels and its consonants 
are full of strict intention; I never saw cause why the most 
charming of essayists hid himself in "Elia," — but he may 
for all that have had pregnant reasons; even so, (but that 
slender wit could read my riddle,) you shall perhaps find fault 
with my Mussulman agnomen ; still you and I equally par- 
ticipate in this shallow secret, and within so brief a word is 
concealed the key to unlock the casket that tempts your 
curiosity: however, the less said of so diaphanous a mystery 
the better. 

And let me remark this of the mode anonymous ; a mode, 
indeed, to purposes of shame and slander and falsity of all 
kinds too often prostituted : for the present bear with it ; 
sometimes it is well to go disguised, and the voice of one 
unseen lacks not eager listeners; we address your judg- 
ment, unbiased by the prejudice or sanction of a name; we 
put forth, lightly and negligently, those lesser matters which 
opportunity hath not yet matured ; we escape the nervous 
pains, the literary perils of the hardier acknowledged. Only 
of this one thing be sure ; we — (no, I ; why should unregal, 
unhierarchal I affect pluralities ?) — I hope to keep inviolate, 
as much when masked as when avowed, the laws of truth, 
charity, sincerity, and honor ; and, although among my many 
booklets, the grave and the gay will be found in near ap- 
proximation, I trust — (will it offend any to tell them that I 
pray ?) — to do no ill service at any time to the cause of that 
true religion w 7 hich resents not the neighborhood of innocent 
cheerfulness. I show you, friend, my honest mind. 

I by itself, I; odious monolitteral ; thinnest, feeblest, most 



A RAMBLE. 23 

insignificant of letters, I dread your egotistic influence as 
my bane : they will not suffer you, nor bear with a book 
so speckled with your presence. Still, world, hear me ; 
mercifully spare a poor grammarian the penance of per- 
petual third persons ; let an individual tender conscience 
escape censure for using the true singular in preference to 
that imposing lie, the plural. Suffer a humble unit to speak 
of himself as I, and, once for all, let me permissively dis- 
claim intentional self-conceit in the needful usage of isolated 
I-ship. 

These few preliminaries being settled, though I fear little 
to the satisfaction of either party concerned, let us proceed 
— further to preliminarize ; for you will find even to the end, 
as you may have found out already from the beginning, that 
your white knight is mounted rather on an ambling pream- 
bling palfrey, than on any determinate charger ; curveting 
and prancing, and rambling and scrambling at his own un- 
maneged will : scorning the bit and bridle, too hot to bear 
the spur, careless of listing laws, and wishing rather playfully 
to show his paces, than to tilt against a foe. 

An author's mind, qua author, is essentially a gossip ; an 
oral, ocular, imaginative, common place-book ; a pot pourri 
mixed from the hortus siccus of education, and the greener 
garden of internal thought that springs in fresh verdure about 
the heart's own fountain ; a compound of many metals flow- 
ing from the mental crucible as one, — perchance a base alloy, 
perchance new 7 , and precious, and beautiful as the fine brass 
of Corinth ; an accidental meeting in the same small chamber 
of many spiritual essences, that combine as by magnetism 
into some strange and novel substance ; a mixture of appro- 
priations, made lawfully a man's own by labor spent upon 
the raw material ; corn-clad Egypt rescued from a burnt 



24 THE AUTHOR'S MIND. 

Africa by the richness of a swelling Nile, — the black forest 
of pines changed into a laughing vineyard by skill, enter- 
prise, and culture, — the mechanism of Frankenstein's man of 
clay, energized at length by the spark Promethean. 

And now, reader, do you begin to comprehend me, and 
my title ? " an author's mind" is first in the field, and, as 
with root and fruit, must take precedence of its booklets ; 
bear then, if you will, with this desultory anatomization of 
itself yet a little longer, and then in good time and moderate 
space you will come to the rudiments, bones so to speak of 
its many members, the framework on w T hich its nerves and 
muscles hang, the names of its unborn children, the titlepages 
of its own unprinted books. 

Philosophers and fools, separately or together, as the case 
may be, — for folly and philosophy not seldom form one Janus- 
head, and Minerva's bird seems sometimes not ill fitted with 
the face of Momus, — these and their thousand intermediates 
have tried in all ages to define that quaint enigma, Man : and 
I wot not that any pundit of literature hath better succeeded 
than the nameless fameless man, — or woman, w r as it? — or 
haply some innocent shrewd child, — w T ho whilom did enun- 
ciate that man isa writing animal : true as arithmetic, clear 
as the sunbeam, rational as Euclid, a discerning, just, ex- 
clusive definition. That he is " capable of laughter," is well 
enough even for thy deathless fame, Stagyrite, but equally 
(so Buffbn testifies) are apes and monkeys, horses and hyenas; 
whether perforce of tickling, or sympathy, or native notions 
of the humorous, we will not stop to contend. That he 
actually is " an animal whose best wisdom is laughter," hath 
but little reason in it, Democrite, seeing there are such ob- 
vious anomalies among men as suicidal jesters, and cachin- 
nating idiots ; nevertheless, my punster of Abdera, thy whim- 



A RAMBLE. 25 

sical fancy, surviving the wreck of dynasties, and too light to 
sink in the billows of oblivion, is now become the popular 
thought, the fashionable dress of heretofore moping wisdom: 
crow, an thou wilt, jolly old Chanticleer, but remember thee 
thou crowestona dunghill ; man is not a mere merry-andrew. 
Neither is he exclusively " a weeping animal," lugubrious 
Heraclite, no better definer than thy laughter-loving foe : that 
man weeps, or ought to weep, the world within him and the 
world without him indeed bear testimony ; but is he the only 
mourner in this valley of grief, this travailing creation ? no, 
no; they walk lengthily in black procession: yet is this 
present writing not the fit season for enlarging upon sorrows ; 
we must not now mourn and be desolate as a poor bird griev- 
ing for its pilfered young, — (is Macduff's lamentable cry for 
his lost little ones " All — what all?" more piteous?) we must 
not now indulge in despondent fears like yonder hard-run stag, 
with terror in his eye and true tears coursing down his melan- 
choly face; we must hot now moan over cruelty and ingratitude 
like that poor old worn-out horse, crying, positively crying, 
and looking imploringly for merciful rest into man's iron face ; 
we must not scream like the wounded hare, nor beat against 
our cage like the wild bird prisoned from its freedom. More- 
over, Heraclite, even in thine own day thou mightest well 
have heard of the classic wailings of Philomel for Atys, or of 
consumptive Canens, that shadow of a voice, for her meta- 
morphosed Pie, and have known that very crocodiles have 
tears: pass on, thy desolate definition hath not served for 
Man. 

With flippant tongue a mercantile Cosmopolite, stable in 
statistics and learned in the ledger, here interposes an erudite 
suggestion, — Cl Man is a calculating animal:" surely, so he 
is, unless he be a spendthrift ; but he still shares his quality 



26 THE AUTHOR'S MIND. 

with others, for the squirrel hoards his nuts, the ant lays in 
her barleycorns, the moon knoweth her seasons, and the sun 
his going down : moreover, Chinese slates, multiplying rulers, 
and, as their aggregated wisdom, Babbage's machine, will 
stoutly contest so mechanical a fancy. Savoury steams, and 
those too smelling strongly of truth, assault the nostrils, as a 
Vitellite — (what a name of hungry omen for the imperial de- 
vourer) — plausibly insinuates man to be "a cooking animal ;" 
— who can gainsay it? and wherewithal, but with domesti- 
cated monkeys, does he share this happy attribute ? It is true, 
the butcher-bird spits his prey on a thorn, the slow epicurean 
boa glazes his mashed antelope, the king of vultures quietly 
waits for a gamey taste, and the rapid roasting of the tropics : 
but all this care, all this caloric cannot be accounted culinary, 
and without a question, the kitchen is a sphere where the lord 
of creation reigns supreme: still, thou best of practical philoso- 
phers, caterer for daily dinner, — man, man, I say, is not alto- 
gether a compact of edible commons, a FalstafF pudding-bag 
robbed of his seasoning wit, a mere congeries of food and 
pickles ; moreover, honest Gingel of "fair" fame hath (or used 
to have, " in my warm youth, when George the Third was 
King,") automatons, [pray observe, Sosii, I am not pedant 
or wiseacre enough to indite automata ; we conquering 
Britons stole that word among many others from poor dead 
Greece, who couldn't want it ; having made it ours in the 
singular, why be bashful about the plural ? So also of me- 
morandums, omnibuses, [you remember Farren's omniBi !] 
necropolises, gymnasiums, eukeirogeneions, and other unle- 
gacied property of dear departed Rome and Greece. All 
this, as you see, is clearly parenthetical;] well, then, Gingel 
has automatons, that will serve you up all kinds of delicate 
viands, pleasant meats, and choice cates by clockwork, to 



A RAMBLE. 27 

say nothing of Jones' patent All-in-a-moment-anything-what- 
soever-cooking apparatus : no, mine Apiciite, Heliogabalite, 
Sardanapalite, Seftonite, Udite, thou of extravagant ancestry, 
and indifferent digestion; little, indeed, as you may credit 
me, Man is not all stomach, nor altogether formed alone 
for feeding. Remember /Esop's parable, the belly and the 
members; and, above them all, do not overlook the Head. 

What think you then of "a featherless biped?" gravely 
suggests a rusty Plinyite : absolute sir, and most obsolete 
Roman, doubtless you never had the luck to set eyes upon a 
turkey at Christmas ; the poor bare bipes implumis, a forked 
creature, waiting to be forked supererogatively ; ay, and 
risibilis to boot, if ever all concomitants of the hearty old 
festival were properly provocative of decent mirth. Thus 
then return we to our muttons, and time enough, quotha: 
literary pundit, (whose is the notable saying?) thy definition 
is bomb-proof, thy fancy unscaleable, thy thought too deep 
for undermining : that notion is at the head of the poll, a 
candidate approved of Truth's most open borough; for, in 
spite of secretary birds with pens stuck clerklike behind their 
ears, (as useless an emblem of sinecure office as gold keys, 
silver, and coronation armor,) — in spite of whole flights of 
geese, capable enough of saving capitols, but impotent to 
wield one of their own all-conquering quills, — in spite, also, 
(keen-eyed categorist, be to my faults in ratiocination a lit- 
tle blind, for very cheerfulness,) in spite, I say, of copying 
presses, manifold inditers, and automaton artists, man is a 

WRITING ANIMAL. 

Wearily enough, you will think, have we disposed of this 
one definition : but recollect and take me for a son of leisure, 
an amateur tourist of Parnassus, and idling gatherer of way- 
side flowers in the vales of Thessaly, a careless, unbusied, 



28 THE AUTHOR'S MIND. 

il contemplative man" recreating himself by gentle craft on 
the banks of much-poached Helicon ; and if you, my casual 
friend, be neither like-minded in fancy nor like-fitted in lei- 
sure, courteously consider that we may not travel well toge- 
ther ; at this station let us stop, freely forgiving each the other 
for mutual mislikings ; to your books, to your business, to 
your fowling, to your feasting, to your mummery, to your 
nunnery — go : my track lays away from the highroad, in and 
out between yonder hills, among thickets, mossy rocks, green 
hollows, high fern, and the tangled hair of hiding river-gods ; 
I meet not peddlers and bagsmen, but stumble upon fawns 
just dropped, and do not scare their doting mothers; I 
quench not my noonday thirst with fiery drams from a brazen 
tap, but lying over the cold brook drink to its musical 
Naiades ; I w T alk no dusty roads of a working-day world, 
but flit upon the pleasant places of one made up of holidays. 
A truce to this truancy, and method be my maxim : let us 
for a moment link our reasonings, and solder one stray rivet ; 
man being a writing animal, there still remains the ques- 
tion, what is writing? — Ah, there's the rub : a very comfort- 
able definition would it be, if every pen-holder and pen- 
wiper could truly claim that kingship of the universe, — that 
imagery of his Maker, that mystical, marvelous, immortal, 
intellectual, abstraction manhood : but, what then is writ- 
ing? — Ye tons of invoices, groaning shelves of incalculable 
ledgers, parchment abhorrences of rare Charles Lamb, we 
think not now of you ; dreary piles of unhealthy-looking 
law-books, hypochondriacal heaps of medical experiences, 
plodding folios of industrious polemics, slow elaborations of 
learned dullness, we spare your native dust; letters unnum- 
bered, in all stages of cacography, both physical and meta- 
physical, alack, most of you must slip through the meshes of 



A RAMBLE. 29 

our definition yet unwove ; poor deciduous leaves of the 
forest, that, at your best, serve only — (it is yet a good pur- 
pose) — to dress the common soil of human kindness, with- 
out attaining to the praise of wreaths and chaplets ever hang- 
ing in the Muses' temple ; flowers withered on the stalk, 
whose blooming beauty no lover's hand has dropped upon 
the sacred waters of Siloa, like the Hindoo's garland on her 
Ganges; prolix, vain, ephemeral letters, (especially en- 
veloped penny-posters,) — and sparing only some few redo- 
lent of truth, wisdom, and affection, — your bulky majority 
of flippant trash, staid advices, dunnings, hoaxings, lyings, 
and slanderings degrade you to a lower rank than that we 
take on us to designate as " writing." 

And what, what — (" how poor is he that hath not pa- 
tience!") — shall we predicate of the average viscera of 
circulating libraries? — abominable viscera! — isn't that the 
word, my young Hippocrates? — A parley, a parley! and the 
terms of truce are these : — If this present pastime of mine 
(for a pastime it is, so spurn not at its logic), be mercifully 
looked on by you, lady novelists and male dittos, — (yet truly 
there are giants in your ranks, as Scott, and Ward, and 
Hugo, and Le Sage, towering above ten thousand pigmies,) 
— if I be spared your censures well-deserved, interchange- 
ably as toward your authorships will I exercise the charitable 
wisdom of silence: a white flag or a white feather is my best 
alternative in soothing or avoiding so terrible a host ; and 
verily, to speak kinder of those whose wit, and genius, and 
graphic powers have so smoothed this old world's wrinkled 
face of care, many brilliant, many clever, many well-intended 
caterers to public amusement throng your ill-ordered ranks: 
still, there are numbered to your shame as followers of the 
fool's-cap standard, the huge corrupting mass of depraved 



30 THE AUTHOR'S MIND. 

moralists, meagre trash-inditers, treacherous scandal-mon- 
gers, men about town who immortalize their shame, and the 
dull, pernicious school of feather-brained Romancists : and 
take this sentence for a true one, a verum-dictum. But 
enough; there are others, and those not few, even far less 
veniable ; ye priers into family secrets, fawning false guests 
at the great man's open house, eagerly jotting down with 
parricidal pen the unguarded conversation of the hospitable 
board, shame on your treason, on its wages, and its fame! 
ye countless gatherers and disposers of other men's stuff; 
chiels amang us takin' notes, an' faith, to prent 'em too, 
perpetually, without mitigation or remorse; ye men of paste 
and scissors, who so often falsely, feebly, faithlessly, and 
tastelessly are patching into a harlequin whole the disjecta 
membra of some great hacked-up Reputation ; can such as 
ye are tell me what it is to write ? — Writing is the concreted 
fruit of thinking, the original expression of new combinations 
of idea, the fresh chemical product of educational compounds 
long simmering in the mind, the possession of a sixth sense 
distinguishing intelligence, and proclaiming it to the four 
winds; writing is not labor, but ease ; not care, but happi- 
ness ; not the petty pilferings of poverty, but the large over- 
flowings of mental affluence ; it begs not on the highway, 
but gives great largesse, like a king; it preys not on a neigh- 
bor's wealth, but enriches him ; it may light, indeed, a lamp 
at another's candle, but pays him back w T ith brilliancy ; it 
may borrow fire from the common stock, but uses it for 
genial warmth, and noble hospitality. 

Remember well, good critic, (for verily bad there be,) my 
purposes in this odd volume, this queer, unsophisticate, un- 
cultivated book; to empty my mind, to clear my brain of 
cobwebs, to lift off my head a porter's load of fancy articles : 



A RAMBLE. 31 

and as in a bottle of bad champagne, the first glass, leaping 
out hurryskurry, at railroad pace boiling a gallop, carries off 
with it bits of cork and morsels of rosin, even such is the 
first ebullition of my thoughts; take them for what they are 
worth, and blame no one but your discontented self that they 
are no better; do you suppose, keen sir, that I am not quite 
self-conscious of their shallowness, utter contempt of subor- 
dination and selection, their empty reasoning and pellucid 
vanity? — There I have saved you the labor of a sentence, 
and present you with a killing verdict for myself. After a 
little, perhaps, your patience may find me otherwise; of 
clearer flow, but flatter flavor : these desultorinesses must 
first of all be immolated, for in their Ariel state they vex me, 
but I bind them down like slaving Calibans, by the magic of 
a pen ; and glad shall I be to victimize my monsters, eager to 
dissipate my musquito-like tormentors: yea, I would " take 
up arms against a sea" — ["Arms against a sea?" dearest 
Shakspeare, would that Theobald, or Johnson's stock-butt 
"the Oxford Editor," had indeed interpolated that uncon- 
scionable image! It has been sapiently remarked by some 
hornet of criticism, that " Shakspeare was a clever man;" 
but cleverer far must that champion stand forth who wars 
with any prospect of success upon seas ; perhaps Xerxes 
might have thought of it, — or your Astley's brigand, who 
rushes sword in hand on an ocean of green baize ; — who 
shall cure me of parentheses ?] — well, — " a sea of troubles, 
[thoughts trouble us more than things, — I sin again ; close 
it ;] and by opposing end them ;" that is, by setting forth 
these troublous thoughts opposite, in stately black and white, 
I clip their wings, and make them peck among my poultry, 
and not swarm about my heaven. But soon must I be more 
continuous; turn over to my future Titlepages, and spare 



32 THE AUTHOR'S MIND. 

your objurgation ; a little more of this medley, while the fit 
lasts, and afterward a staid course of better-accustomed 
messes ; a few further variations on this lawless theme of 
authorship, and then to try simpler tunes: briefly, and yet to 
be grandiloquent, as a last round of this giddy climax, after 
noisy clashing Chaos there shall roll out, " perfect, smooth, 
and round," green young worldlets, moving in quiet harmony 
and moulded with systematic skill. 

As an Author, meanw T hile, let man be most specifically 
characterized : a real Author, voluntary in his motives, but 
involuntary as regards his acts authorial ; full of matter, pro- 
lific of images and arguments, teeming, bursting, with some- 
thing, much, too much, to say, and well witting how to say 
it : none of your poor devils compulsory from poverty, 
(Plutus help them !) whose penury of pocket is (pardon me) 
too often equitably balanced by their emptiness of head ; and 
far less one of the lady's-maid school who will glory in de- 
scribing a dish of cutlets at Calais, or an ill-trimmed bonnet, 
or the contents of an old maid's reticule, or of a young gen- 
tleman's portmanteau, or those rare occasions for sentiment- 
ality, moonlight, twilight, arbors, and cascades, in the mode- 
rate space of an hour by Shrewsbury clock: but a man 
who has it weightily upon his mind to explain himself and 
others, to insist, refute, enjoin : a man — frown not, fair 
helpmates; the controversial pen, as the controversial sw T ord, 
be ours ; w r e will leave your flower-beds and sweeter human 
nurseries, despotism over cooks and Penelobean penance 
upon carpet-work; nay, a trip to Margate prettily described, 
easy lessons and gentle hymns in behalf of those dear prat- 
tlers, and for the more coerulean sort, " lyrics to the Lost 
one," or stanzas on a sickly geranium, miserably perishing 
in the mephitic atmosphere of routs, these w 7 e masculine 



A RAMBLE. 33 

tyrants, we Dionysii of literature, ill-naturedly have accounted 
your prerogatives of authorship : but, who then are Sevigne 
and Somerville, Edgeworth and De Stael, Barbauld and 
Benger, and Aikin, and Jameson, Hemans, Landon, and a 
thousand more, not less learned, less accomplished, nor less 
useful? — forgive, great names, my half-repeated slander: rid- 
ing with the self-conceited cortege of male critics, my boasted 
loyalty was well-nigh guilty of leze majeste: but I repudiate 
the thought; my verdict shall have no reproach in it, as my 
championship no fear : how much has man to learn from 
woman ! teach us still to look on humanity in love, on nature 
in thankfulness, on death without fear, on heaven without 
presumption ; fairest, forgive those foolish and ungallant 
calumnies of my ruder sex, who boast themselves your 
teachers, — making yet this w T ise use of the slander; never 
be so bold in authorship, as to hazard the loss of your sweet, 
retiring, modest, amiable, natural dependence : never stand 
out as champions on the arena of strife, but, if you will, 
strew it with posies for the king of the tournament ; it ill 
becomes you to be wrestlers, though a Lycurgus allowed it, 
and Atalanta, another Eve, w^as tripped up by an apple in 
the foot-race. So digressing, return we to our Author ; to 
wit, a man, homo, — a human, as they say in the west, — with 
news of actual value to communicate, and powers of pen 
competent to do so graphically, honestly, kindly, boldly. 

Much as we may emulate Homer's wordy braggadocios in 
boasting ourselves far better than our fathers, still, great was 
the wisdom of our ancestors : and that time-tried wisdom has 
given us three things that make a man ; he must build a house, 
have a child, write a book ; and of this triad of needfuls, 
who perceives not the superior and innate majesty of the 
last requisite ? — " Build a house ?" I humbly conceive, and 
3 



34 THE AUTHOR'S MIND. 

steal my notion from the same ancestral source, that, in nine 
cases out of ten, fools build houses for wise men to live in ; 
besides, if houses be made a test of supreme manhood, your 
modern wholesale runner-up of lath and plaster tenements, 
warranted to stand seven years provided quadrilles be ex- 
cluded and no larger flock of guests than six be permitted to 
settle on one spot, — such a jackal for surgeons, such a repro- 
bate provider for accident-wards as this, would be among 
our heroes, a prize-man, the flower of the species. " Chil- 
dren" too? — very happy, beautiful, heart-gladdening crea- 
tions, — God bless them all, and scatter those who love them 
not ! — but still for a proof of more than average humanity, 
somewhat common, somewhat overwhelming: rabbits beat 
us here, with all our fecundity, so offensive to Martineau and 
Malthus. But as to " books," — common enough, too, smirks 
gentle reader : pardon, courteous sir, most rare, — at least in 
my sense ; I speak not of flat current shillings, but the bold 
medallions of ancient Syracuse ; I heed not the dull thousands 
of minted gold and silver, but the choice coin-sculptures of 
Larissa and Tarentum. There do indeed flow hourly from 
an ever-w T elling press rivers of words ; there are indeed shoal- 
ing us up on all sides a throng of well-bound volumes, — 
novels, histories, poems, plays, memoirs, and so forth, — to 
all appearance, books : but if by " books" be intended origi- 
nality of matter, independent arguments, water turned wine 
by the miracle of right-thinking, and not a mere re-decanter- 
ing of dregs from other vessels, these many masqueraded 
forms, these multiplied images of little-varied likeness, these 
Protean herds, will not stay to be counted, nor abide judg- 
ment, nor brook scrutiny, but will merge and melt by thou- 
sands into the one, or the two, real, original, sterling Books. 
We live in a monopolylogue of authorship : an idea goes 



A RAMBLE. 35 

forth to the world's market-place well dressed from the ward- 
robe of some master-mind ; it greets the public with a capti- 
vating air, and straightway becomes the rage ; it seems epi- 
demical ; it comes out simultaneously as a piece of political 
economy, a cookery-book, a tragedy, a farce, a novel, a re- 
ligious experience, an abstract ism, or a concrete ology ; till 
the poor worn-out, dissipated shadow of a thought looks so 
feeble, thin, fashionably affected and fashionably infected, 
that its honest bluff old father for very shame disowns it. 
Thus has it come to pass, that one or two minds, in this 
golden age of scribbling, have, to speak radically, been the 
true originators of a million volumes, which haply shall have 
sprung from the seed of some singular book, — or of books 
counted in the dual. 

Indignant authors, be not merciless on my candor: I con- 
fess too much w'hereof I hold you guilty, — I am one of your- 
selves, and I question not that few of you can beat me in a 
certain sort of — I will say, unintended, plagiarism; you are 
thieves, — patience, — I thieve from thieves; Diogenes cannot 
see me any more than you; you copy phrases, I am perpetu- 
ally and unconsciously filching thoughts ; my entomological 
netted-scissors, wherewith I catch those small fowl on the 
wing, are always within reach ; you will never find me with- 
out well-tenanted pill-boxes in my pocket, and perhaps a 
buzzing captive or two stuck in spinning thraldom on my 
castor ; you are petty larceners, I profess the like metier of 
intellectual abstractor ; you pilfer among a crowd of volumes, 
manuscripts, rare editions, conflicting commentators, and your 
success depends upon reusage of the old materials ; w T hereas 
I sit alone and bookless in my dining parlor, thinking over 
bygone fancies, reconsidering exploded notions, appropria- 
ting all I find of lumber in the warehouse of my memory, and 



36 THE AUTHOR'S MIND. 

if need be, without scruple, quietly digesting as my special 
provender the thoughts of others originated ages ago. 

Is it necessary to remind you, — dropping this lightsome 
vein for a precious moment, — that I am penning away my 
" crudities," off-hand, at the top of my speed? that my set 
intention is, if possible, to jot down instanter my heavy brain- 
ful, and feel for once lightheaded ? — I stick to my title, u An 
Author's Mind," and that with a laudable scorn of conceal- 
ment, and an honest purpose not to pretend it better or wiser 
than it is ; then let no one blame me on the score of my 
fashion of speech, or my sarcasms mingled with charity, — for 
consistency with me were inconsistent. 

Neither let me, poor innocent, be accused of giving license 
to what a palled public and dyspeptical reviewers will call for 
the thousandth time a cacoethes ; w T ord of cabalistic look, 
unknown to Dr. Dilworth. Truly, my masters, though dis- 
ciple I be of venerable Martinus the Scribbler ; though, for 
aught I know, himself in progress of transmigration ; still, 
I submit, my cornucopia is not crammed with leaves and 
chopped straw ; and if in utter carelessness the fruit is poured 
out pell-mell after this desultory fashion, yet, I wot, it is fruit, 
though whether ripe, or crude, or rotten, my husbandry takes 
little thought: the mixture serves for my cider-press, and, 
fermentation over, the product will be clarified. Judge me 
too, am I not consecutive ? — I've shown man to be a writing 
animal; and writing, w T hat it is and is not; and meanwhile 
have been routing recreatively at pen's point whims, and 
fancies, and ideas and images pulled in manfully by head 
and shoulders: and now, — after an episode, quite relevant 
and quite Herodotean, concerning the consequences of a bit 
of successful authorship on a man's scheme of life, to illus- 
trate yet more the " Author's mind," — I shall proceed to tell 



A RAMBLE. 37 

all men how many books I might, could, should, or would 
have written, but for reiterated and legitimated buts, and 
how near of kin I must esteem myself to the illustrious J. of 
nursery rhymes, being, as he is or was, M Mister Joe Jenkins, 
who played on the fiddle, and began twenty tunes, but left 
off in the middle." Moreover, no one can be ignorant of 
the close consanguinity recognized in every age and every 
dictionary between I and J. But now for the episode. 

If ever a toy were symbolical of Life, that toy was a Kalei- 
doscope : the showy bits of tinsel, colored glass, silk, beads, 
and feathers, with here and there perchance a stray piece of 
iridescent ore or a pin, each, in its turn of ideal multiplica- 
tion, filling successively the field of vision ; the trifling touch 
that will disenchant the fairest patterns ; the slightest change, 
as in chemical arithmetic, that will make the whole mixture 
a poison or a cordial. A man is vexed, the nerve of his 
equanimity thrillingly touched at the tender elbow, and forth- 
with his whole wholesome body writhes in pain; while, to 
speak morally, those useful reminders of life's frailty, the 
habitual side-thorns, — spurs of diligence, incentives to better 
things, — are exaggerated into six-fold spears, and terribly 
stop the way like long-lanced Achaeans : a careless fit suc- 
ceeds to one of spleen, and vanity well spangled, pretty 
baubles, stars and trinkets and trifles, fill their cycle, to mag- 
netize with folly that rolling world the brain : another twist, 
and Love is lord paramount, a paltry bit of glass, casually 
rose-colored, shedding its warm blush over all the reflective 
powers: suddenly an overcast, for that marplot, Disappoint- 
ment has obtruded a most vexatiously reiterated morsel of 
lamp-black : again Hope's little bit of blue paint makes 
azure rainbows all about the firmament of man's own inner 
world ; and at last an atom of gold dust specks all the glasses 



38 THE AUTHOR'S MIND. 

with its lurid yellow, and haply leaves the old miser to his 
master-passion. So, ever changing day by day, every man's 
life is but a kaleidoscope. Stay, — this simile is somewhat 
of the longest, but the whim is upon me, and I must have 
my way; the fit possesses me to try a sonnet, and I shall 
look far for a fairer thesis ; he that hates verse, — and the 
Muses now-a-days are too old-maidish to look for many 
lovers, — may skip it, and no harm done ; but one or two 
may like this stave on 

LIFE: 

I saw a child w T ith a kaleidoscope, 

Turning at will the tesselated field ; 

And straight my mental eye became unseal'd, 
I learnt of life, and read its horoscope : 

Behold, how fitfully the patterns change ! 
The scene is azure now with hues of Hope ; 

Now sobered gray by Disappointment strange ; 

With Love's own roses blushing, warm and bright ; 

Black with Hate's heat, or white with Envy's cold; 
Made glorious by Religion's purple light ; 

Or sicklied o'er with yellow lust of Gold; 
So, good or evil coming, peace or strife, 

Zeal when in youth, and Avarice when old, 
In changeful chanceful phases passeth Life. 

It is well I was not stopped before my lawful fourteenth 
rhyme by yonder prosaic gentleman, humbly listening in 
front, who asks with somewhat of malicious triumph, whereto 
does all this lead? — Categorically, sir, [there is no argument 
in the world equal to a word of six syllables,] Categorically, 



A RAMBLE. 39 

sir, to this ; of all life's turns and twists few things produce 
more change to the daring debutant than successful author- 
ship ; it is as if, applying our simile, a fragment of printed 
bookishness among those kaleidoscopic morsels, having 
worked its way into the field of vision, had there got stereo- 
typed by a photogenic process : in fact, it fixes on it a pre- 
destinated " Author's mind." 

An Author's mind! what a subject for the lights and 
shadows of metaphysical portraiture ; what a panorama of 
images ; what a whirling scene of ever-changing incidents ; 
what a storehouse for thoughts; what aland of marvels; 
what untrodden heights, what unexplored depths of an ever- 
undiscovered country. That strange world hath a structure 
and a furniture all its own; its chalcedonic rocks are painted 
with rare creatures floating in their liquid-seeming hardness; 
forms of other spheres lie buried in its lias cliffs ; seeds of 
unknown plants, relics of unlimned reptiles, fragments of an 
old creation, the ruins of a fanciful cosmogony, lie hid until 
the day of their requiral beneath its fertile soil : and then its 
lawless botany ; flowers of glorious hue hung upon the trees 
of its forests ; luscious fruits flung liberally among the mosses 
of its banks; air-plants sailing in its atmosphere ; unanchored 
water-lilies dancing in its bright cascades ; and this, too, a 
world, an inner secret world, peopled with unthought images, 
specimens of a peculiar creation ; outlandish forms are started 
from its thickets, the dragon and the cherub are numbered 
with its winged inhabitants, and herds of uncouth shape pas- 
ture on its meadows: who can sound its seas, deep calling 
unto deep? who can stand upon its hill-tops, height beckon- 
ing unto height ? who can track its labyrinths ? who can map 
its caverns? — A limitless essence, an unfailing spring, an 
evergreen fruit-tree, a riddle unsolved, a quaint museum, a 



40 THE AUTHOR'S MIND. 

hot-bed of inventions, an over-mantling tankard, a whimsi- 
cal motley, a bursting volcano, a full, independent, generous, 
— a poor, fettered, jealous, Anomaly, such — bear witness, — 
is an author's mind. O theme of many topics, chaos of ill- 
sorted fancies! — Let us come now to the jealousies, the real 
or imaginary w r rongs of Authorship : hereafter treat w r e this 
at lengthier; " for the time present" — I quote the facetious 
Lord Coke, when writing on that highly exhilarating topic 
the common-law, — " hereof let this little taste suffice. 55 Is 
it not a wrong to be taken for a mere book-merchant, a mer- 
cenary purveyor of learning and invention, of religion and 
philosophy, of instruction or even of amusement, for the 
sole consideration of value received, as one would use a 
stalking-horse for getting near a stag? this, too, when ten to 
one some cormorant on the tree of knowledge, some staid- 
looking publisher in decent mourning, is complacently pock- 
eting the profits, and modestly charging you with loss ? and 
this, moreover and more poignantly, when the flame of re- 
sponsibility on some high subject is blazing at your heart, 
and the young Elihu, even if he would, cannot keep silence? 
Is it not a wrong to find pearls unprized, because many a 
modern, like his Celtic progenitors, (for I must not say like 
swine,) would sooner crush an acorn? to know your estima- 
tion among men ebbs and flows according to the accident of 
success, rather than the quality of merit? to be despised as 
an animal who must necessarily be living on his w T its in some 
purlieu, answering to that antiquated reproach, a Grub Street 
attic ; or suspected among gentler company in this most mer- 
cantile age for a pickpocket, a pauper, a chevalier d 5 indus- 
trie ? And then those hounds upon the bleeding flanks of 
many a hunted author, those open-mouthed inexorable critics, 
(I allude to the Pariah class, not to the higher caste brethren,) 



A RAMBLE. 41 



how suddenly they rend one, and fear not! Only for others 
do I speak, and in no degree on account of having felt their 
fangs, as many have done, my betters; gentle and kind, as 
domesticated spaniels, have reviewers in general been to your 
humble confessor, and for such courtesies is he their debtor. 
But who can be ignorant how frequently some hapless writer 
is impaled alive on the stake of ridicule, that a flao-o-ino- ma - 
gazine may be served up with sauce piquante, and pander 
to the world for its waning popularity by the malice of a 
pungent article? who, while as a rule he may honor the 
bench of critics for patience, talent, and impartiality, is not 
conusant of those exceptions, not seldom of occurrence, 
where obvious rancor has caused the unkindly condemna- 
tion ; where personal inveteracy aims from behind the Ajax 
shield of anonymous reviewing, and shoots, like a cowardly 
Teucer, the foe fair-exposed whom he dare not fight with? — 
But, as will be seen hereafter, I trespass on a Titlepage, and 
here will add no more than this: is it not awrono- of double 
edge, that while the world makes no excuse for the writhing 
writer, on the reasonable ground that after all he may be 
innocent of what his critics blame him for, the same good- 
natured world, on almost every occasion of magazine ap- 
plause, believes either that the author has written for himself 
the favorable notice, or that pecuniary bribes have made the 
honest editor his tool ? Verily, my public, thou are not gene- 
rous here ; ay, and thou art grievously deceived, as well as 
sordid : for by careless praise, causeless censure, credit given 
for corrupt bribery, and no allowance made for unamiable 
criticism, poor maltreated authors speak to many wrongs: 
and of them more anon. 

What moreover shall we say of chilling friendships, near 
estrangements, heartless lovers loitering behind, shy acquaint- 



42 THE AUTHOR'S MIND. 

ances dropping off? Verily there is a mighty sifting : you 
have dared to stand alone, have expounded your mind in 
imperishable print, have manifested wit enough to outface 
folly, sufficient moral courage to condemn vice, and more 
than is needful of good wisdom to shame the oracles of 
worldliness: and so some dread you, some hate, and many 
shun : the little selfish asterisks in that small sky fly from your 
constellatory glories : you are independent, a satellite of none : 
you have dared to think, write, print, in all ways contrary to 
many ; and if wise men and good be loud in their applause, 
you arrive at the dignity of manifold hatreds ; but if those 
and their inferiors condemn, you sink into the bathos of mul- 
tiplied contempts. Of other wrongs somewhen and where, 
hereafter; meanwhile, a better prospect glows on the kaleido- 
scopic field, — a flattering accession of new and ardent friends : 
" Sir," said an old priest to a young author, " you have made 
a soft pillow for your head when it comes to be as white as 
mine is;" a pretty saying of sweet charity, and such sink 
deep : as for the younger and the warmer, being mostly of 
the softer sex, some will profess admiring sensations that 
border not a little on idolatries; others, gayer, will appear 
in the dress of careless unskillful admiration ; not a few, both 
men and women, go indeed weakly along with the current 
stream of popularity, but, to say truth, look happiest when 
they find some stinging notice that may mortify the new bold 
candidate for glory; while, last and best, a fewer, a very 
much fewer, do handsomely the liberal part of friends, com- 
mending where they can, objecting where they must, sincere 
in sorrow for a fault, rejoicing without envy for a virtue. 

Many like phenomena has authorship : a certain class of 
otherwise humanized and well-intentioned people begin to 
regard your scribe as a monster, — not a so-called " lion" to 



A RAMBLE. 43 

be sought, but some strange creature to be dreaded : Perdi- 
tion ! what if he should be cogitating a novel or a play, and 
means to make free with our characters ? what if that libelous 
co-partnership of Saunders and Ottley is permitted to display 
our faults and foibles, flimsily disguised, before a mocking 
world ? Disappointed maidens that hover on the verge of 
forty, and can sympathize with Jephtha's daughter in her 
lonely mournings, causelessly begin to fear that a mischiev- 
ous author may appropriate their portraits; venerable bache- 
lors who have striven to earn some little local notoriety by 
the diligent use of an odd phrase, a quaint garment, or an 
eccentric fling in the peripatetic, dread a satirist's powers of 
retributive burlesque ; table orators suddenly grow dumb, for 
they suspect such a caitiff intends cold-blooded plagiarisms 
from their eloquence ; the twinkling stars of humble village 
spheres shun him for an ominous comet, whose very trail 
robs them of light, or as paling glow r -worms hide away be- 
fore some prying lantern ; and all who have in one way or 
another prided themselves on some harmless peculiarity, 
avoid his penetrating glance as the eye of a basilisk. Then, 
again, those casual encounters of witlings in the w r orld autho- 
rial, so anticipated by a hostess, so looked-forward-to by 
guests, — in most cases how forlorn they be, how dull, con- 
strained, suspicious ; like rival traders, w T ith pockets instinct- 
ively buttoned up, and glaring each upon the other with 
most uncommunicative aspects ; not brothers at a banquet, 
but combatants and wrestlers, watching for solecisms in the 
other's talk, or toiling to drag in some labored witticism of 
their own, after the classical precedent of Hercules and Cer- 
berus ; those feasts of reason, how vapid! those flows of soul, 
how icily congealing! those Attic nights, how dim and dis- 
mal' Once more; and, remember me, I speak in a person- 



44 THE AUTHOR'S MIND. 

ated character, of the general and not experimentally ; so, 
flinging self aside, let me speak what I have seen : grant that 
the world-without crown a man with bays, and lead him to 
his Theban home with tokens of rejoicing; is the victor there 
set on high, chapleted, and honored as Nemean heroes should 
be ? or does he not rather droop instantly again into the ob- 
scure unit among a level mass, only the less welcome, for 
having stood up, a Saul or a Musaeus, with his head above 
his fellows ? Verily, no man is a proph — enough, enough ; 
for ours is a high prerogative, a glorious calling, and 
the crown of barren leaves is costlier than his of Rabbah ; 
enough, enough, sing we the praises, count we well the plea- 
sures of fervent, overflowing authorship. There, in perfect 
shape before the eyes, there, well born in beauty, there, 
perpetually (so your fondness hopes) to live, slumbers in her 
best white robe the mind's own fairest daughter ; the Minerva 
has sprung in panoply from that parental aching head, and 
stands in her immortal independence ; an Eve, his own heart's 
fruit, welcomes delighted Adam. You have made something, 
some good work, bodily; your communion has commenced 
with those of times to come ; your mind has produced a wit- 
ness to its individuality ; there is a tablet sacred to its me- 
mory standing among men for ever. 

A thinker is seldom great in conversation, and the glib 
talkers who have silenced such an one frequently in clamo- 
rous argument, founder in his deep thoughts, blundering, 
like Stephanos and Trinculos — (let Caliban be swamped ;) 
such generous revenge is sweet: a writer, often unexplained 
because speaking little, and that little foolishly mayhap, and 
lightly for the holiday's sake of an unthoughtful rest, finds his 
opportunities in printing, and gives the self-expounding that 
he needs; such heart- emptyings yield heart-ease : an author, 



A RAMBLE. 45 



who has done his good work well, — for of such an one alone 
we speak, — while, privately, he scarce could have refreshed 
mankind by pretty driblets, — in the perpetuity, publicity, and 
universal acceptation of his high and honorable calling, does 
good by wholesale, irrigates countries, and gladdens largely 
the large heart of human society: and are not these unbounded 
pleasures, spreading over life, and comforting the struggles 
of a death-bed ? Yes, rising as Ezekiel's river from ankle 
to knee, from knee to girdle, from girdle to the overflowing 
flood, — far beyond those lowest joys, which many wise have 
trampled under foot, of praise, and triumph, and profit, — the 
authorship of good that has made men better, that has con- 
soled sorrow, advanced knowledge, humbled arrogance, and 
blest humanity, that has sent the guilty to his prayers, and 
has gladdened the Christian in his praises, — the authorship 
of good that has shown God in his loveliness and man in his 
dependence, that has aided the cause of charity, and shamed 
the face of sin, this high beneficence, this boundless good- 
doing, hath indeed a rich recompense, a glorious reward ! 

But we must speed on, and sear these hydra-necks, or we 
shall have as many heads to our discourse, and as puzzling, 
as any treatise of the Puritan divinity. Let us hasten to be 
practical ; let us not so long forget the promised Titlepages ; 
let it at length satisfy to show more than theoretically, how 
authorship stirs up the mind to daily-teeming projects, and 
then casts out its half-made progeny ; how scraps of paper 
come to be covered with the cabala of half-written thoughts, 
thenceforward doomed to suffer the dispersion-fate of Sibyl- 
line leaves ; how stores of mingled information gravitate 
into something of order, each seed herding with its fellows; 
and how every atom of mixed metal, educationally held in 



46 THE AUTHOR'S MIND. 

solution by the mind, is sought out by a keen precipitating 
test, gregariously building up in time its own true crystal. 

Hereabouts, therefore, and hereafter, in as frank a fashion 
as heretofore, artlessly, too, and, but for crowding fancies, 
briefly, shall follow a full and free confession of the embryo 
circulating library now in the bookcase of my brain ; only 
premising for the last of all last times, that while I know it 
to be morally impossible that all should be pleased herewith, 
I feel it to be intellectually improbable that any one mind 
should equally be satisfied with each of the many parts of a 
performance so various, inconsistent, and unusual ; premising, 
also, that wherein I may have stumbled upon other people's 
titles, it is unwittingly and unwillingly, for the age breeds 
books so quickly, that a man must read harder than I do to 
peruse their very names ; and premising this much farther, that 
I profess to be a sort of dog in the manger, neither using up 
my materials myself, nor letting any one else do so ; and that, 
whether I shall happen or not at any time future to amplify 
and perfect any of these matters, I still proclaim to all book- 
makers, and booksellers, steal not; for so surely as I catch 
any one thus behaving, — (and truly, my masters, the temp- 
tation is but small,) — I will stick a " Sic vos, non vobis," 

on his brazen forehead. 

1 
Wait ! — there remaineth yet a moment in which to say out 

the remnant of my mind, " an Author's mind," its last part- 
ing speech, its dying utterances before extreme unction. I 
owe all the world apologies ; I would pray a catholic forgive- 
ness. Authors and reviewers, critics, and the undiscriminat- 
ing many, fair women, honest men, I cry your pardons uni- 
versally. I do confess the leaning of my mind to lie, strangely 
and Pisa-like, inveterately as at Welsh Caerphilli, out of the 
perpendicular of truth; it is my disposition to make the most 



A RAMBLE. 47 

of all things, for good or for evil; I write, speak, and think, 
as if I were but an unhallowed special pleader ; I color highly, 
and my outlines are too strong ; I am guilty on all sides of 
unintentional misstatements, consequent on the powerful gusts 
of feeling that burst upon my irritable breast ; my heart is no 
smooth Dead Sea, but the still vexed Bermoothes : therefore 
I would print my penitence; I would publish my confessions ; 
I would not hide my humbleness ; and it pleases me to pour 
out in sonnet-form my unconventional 

APOLOGY TO ALL : 

— For I have sinn'd ; oh, grievously and often ; 

Exaggerated ill, and good denied ; 
Blacken'd the shadows only born to soften ; 

And Truth's own light unkindly misapplied : 
Alas for charities unloved, uncherish'd, 

When some stern judgment, haply erring w T ide, 
Hath sent my fancy forth, to dream and tell 

Other men's deeds all evil ! Oh, my heart, 
Renew once more thy generous youth half perish'd, 

Be wiser, kindlier, better than thou art ! 
And first, in fitting meekness, offer well 

All earnest, candid prayers, to be forgiven 
For worldly, harsh, unjust, unlovable 

Thoughts and suspicions against Man and Heaven! 

Friends all, let this be my best amendment: bear w T ith the 
candor, homely though it may be, of your Author's mind; 
and suffer its further revelations of unborn manuscript with 
charitable listening, for they w r ould come forth in real order 
of time, the first having priority and not the best, ungarnished, 



48 ■ THE AUTHOR'S MIND. 

unweeded, uncared-for, humbly, and without any further 
flourish of trumpets. 



Serjeant Ion — I beg his pardon, Talfourd, — somewhere 
gives it as his opinion, that most people in any way troubled 
with a mind, have at some time or other meditated a Tragedy. 
Truly, too, it is a fine vehicle for poetical solemnities, a stout- 
built vessel for an author's graver thoughts; and the bare 
possibility of seeing one's own heart-stirring creation visually 
set forth before a crowded theatre, the prelusive echoes of 
anticipated thundering applause, the expected thrilling silence 
attendant on a pet scene or sentiment, all the tangible ac- 
cessories of painting and music, clever acting and effective 
situation, and beyond and beside these the certain glories of 
the property-wardrobe, make most young minds press for- 
ward to the little likely prize of successful tragedy. That at 
one weak period I was bitten, my honesty would scorn to 
deny ; but, fortunately for my peace of mind, " Melpomene 
looked upon me with an aspect of little favor," and sturdy 
truth-telling Tacitus made me at last but lightly regardful of 
my subject. Moreover, my Pegasus was visited with a very 
abrupt pull-up from other causes : it has been my fatality 
more than once or twice, as you will ere long see, to drop 
upon other people's topics, for who can find anything new 
under the sun ? and I had already been mentally delivered 
of divers fag-ends of speeches, stinging dialogues, and choice 
tit-bits of scenes, (all of which I will mercifully spare you,) 
when a chance peep into Johnson's Lives of the Poets showed 
me mine own fine subject as the work of some long-forgotten 
bard ! This moral earthquake demolished in a moment my 
goodly aerial fabric; the fair plot burst like a meteor: and 



NERO; A TRAGEDY. 49 

an after-recollection of a certain French tragedy-queen, Agrip- 
pina, showed me that the ground was still further pre-occu- 
pied. But it is high time to tell the destined name of my 
abortive play ; in four letters, then, 

NERO; 

A CLASSICAL TRAGEDY: 

IN SEVEN SCENES. 

And now, in pity to an afflicted parent, hear for a while his 
offspring's Roscian capabilities. — First of all, however, (and 
you know how I rejoice in all things preliminary,) let me 
clear my road by explanations; we must pioneer away a 
titular objection, " in seven scenes," and an assumed merit, 
in the term " classical." I abhor scene-shifters; at least 
their province lies more among pantomimes, farces, and 
comedies, than in the region of the solemn tragic muse; her 
incidents should rather partake of the sculpture-like dignity 
of tableaux. My unfashionable taste approves not of a seri- 
ous story being cut up into a vast number of separate and 
shuffled sections ; and the whistle and sliding panels detract 
still more from completeness of illusion : I incline as much 
as is possible to classic unities of time, place, and circum- 
stances, wishing, moreover, every act to be a scene, and 
every scene an act ; with a comfortable green curtain, that 
cool resting-place for the haggard eye, to be the grass-like 
drop, mildly alternating with splendid crime and miserable 
innocence : away with those gaudy intermediates, and, still, 
worse, some intruded ballet ; bring back Garrick's baize, and 
crush the dynasty of headaches. 

But onward: let me farther extenuate the term, seven 
4 



50 NERO 



scenes; the utterance seven " acts" would sound horrific, 
full of extremities of weariness ; but my meaning actually is 
none other than seven acts of one scene each : for the num- 
ber seven there always have been decent reasons, and ours 
may best appear as we proceed, less than a brief seven seem- 
ing insufficient, and more superfluous; again, so mystical a 
number has a staid propriety, and a due double climax of 
rise and fall. Now, as to our adjective "classical:" why 
not, in heroic drama, have something akin to the old Greek 
chorus, with its running comment upon motives and morali- 
ties, somewhat as the mighty-master has set forth in his truly 
patriotic Henry the Fifth ? — However, taking other grounds, 
the epithet is justified both by the subject, and the proposed 
unmodern method of its treatment: but of all this enough, 
for, on second thoughts, perhaps we may do without the 
chorus. 

It is obvious that no historical play can strictly preserve 
the true unity of time ; cause and effect move slower in the 
actual machinery of life, than the space of some three hours 
can allow for: we must unavoidably clump them closer; and 
so long as a circumstance might as well have happened at 
one time as at another, I consider that the poet is justified in 
crowding prior events as near as he may please towards the 
goal of their catastrophe. If then any slight inaccuracy as 
to dates arrests your critical ken, believe that it is not igno- 
rantly careless, but learnedly needful. One other objection, 
and I have done. No man is an utter, inexcusable, irreme- 
diable villain ; there is a spot of light, however hidden, 
somewhere; and, notwithstanding the historian's picture, it 
may charitably be doubted whether we have made due allow- 
ance for his most reasonable prejudice even in Nero's case. 
Human nature has produced many monsters, but, amongst a 



A TRAGEDY. 51 

thousand crimes, there has proverbially lingered in each some 
one seedling of a virtue ; and when we consider the corrup- 
tion of manners in old Rome, the idolatrous flatteries hem- 
ming in the prince, the universal Lie that hid all things from 
his better perceptions, we can fancy some slight extenuation 
for his mad career. Not that it ever was my aim, in modern 
fashion, to excuse villainy, or to gild the brass brow of vice ; 
and verily, I have not spared my odious hero ; nevertheless, 
in selecting so unamiable a subject, (or rather emperor,) I 
wished not to conceal that even in the worst of men there is 
a soil for hope and charity ; and that if despotism has high 
prerogatives, its wealth and state are desperate temptations, 
whose dangers mightily predominate, and whose necessary 
influences, if quite unbiased, tend to utter misery. 

Now to introduce our dramatis personse, with their " cast," 
— for better effect, — rather unreasonably presumed. Nero, 
— (Macready, who would impersonate him grandly, and who, 
moreover, whether complimented or not by the likeness, 
wears a head the very counterpart of Nero's, as every Numis- 
matist will vouch,) — a naturally noble spirit, warped by sen- 
suality and pride into a very tyrant ; liberal in gifts, yet selfish 
in passion ; not incapable of a higher sort of love, yet liable 
to sudden changes, and at times tempestuously cruel. JYai- 
talis, — (say VandenhofF,) — his favorite and evil genius, ori- 
ginally a Persian slave, and still wearing the Eastern cos- 
tume : a sort of Iago, spirting up the willing Nero to all 
varieties of wickedness, getting him deified, and otherwise 
mystifying the poor besotted prince with all kinds of pleasure 
and glory, to subserve certain selfish ends of rapine, power, 
and licentiousness, and to avenge, perhaps, the misfortunes 
of his own country on the chief of her destroyers. Marcus 
Manlius, — (who better than Charles Kean? — supposing these 



NERO : 

artistic combinations not to be quite impossible,) — a fine 
young soldier, of course loving the heroine, captain of Nero's 
body-guard, chivalrous, honorable, noble, and faithful to his 
bad master amid conflicting trials. Publius Dentatus, — (any 
bould speaker ; besides, it would be rather too much "to 
engage all the actors yet awhile;) — a worthy old Roman, 
father of the heroine. Galba, the chief mover in the catas- 
trophe, as also the opener of its causes, an intriguing and 
fierce but well-intentioned patriot, who ultimately becomes 
the next emperor. With Curtius a tribune, senators, con- 
spirators, soldiers, priests, flamens, &c. And so, after the 
ungallant fashion of theatrical play-wrights, as to a class 
inferior to the very &c. of masculines, — (of less intention 
withal than one of those &cs. of crabbed Littleton, like an 
old shoe fricasseed into savoring of all things by its inimita- 
ble Coke,) — come we to the womenkind. Agrippina, — (one 
of the school of Siddons,) — empress-mother, a strong-minded, 
Lady-Macbeth sort of woman, and the only person in the 
world who can awe her amiable son. Lucia, — (you cannot 
be spared here, clever Helen Faucit,) — the heroine, secretly 
a Christian, affianced to Manlius ; a character of martyr's 
daring and woman's love. Ritfa, a haggard old sibyl, with 
both private and public reasons for detesting Nero and 
Nattalis: and all the fitting female attendants to conclude 
the list. 

Each scene, in which each act will be included, should be 
pictorially, so to speak, a tableau in the commencement, and 
a tableau of situation in the end. Let us draw up upon 
scene the first. Background, Rome burning; in front, ruins 
of a fine Tuscan villa, still smoking; and a terminal altar in 
the garden. Plebs running to and fro, full of conventional 
little speeches, with goods, parents, Penates, and other lum- 



A TRAGEDY. 53 



ber rescued from the flames; till a tribune, (hight Curtius,, 
in a somewhat incendiary oration concerning poor men's 
calamities, and against the powers that be, sends them to the 
Capitol with a procession of flamines Diales and vestals, 
dirging solemnly a Roman hymn [some "Ad Capitolium, 
Ad Jovis solium," and so forth] to good music. At the end 
of the train come in Publius and Lucia, to whom from oppo- 
site hurriedly walks Galba, full of talk of omens, direful 
doings, patriotism, and old Rome's ruin. To these let there 
be added — to speak mathematically — open-hearted Manlius ; 
and let there follow certain disceptatious converse about Xero, 
Manlius excusing him, extenuating his vices by his temp- 
tations, giving military anecdotes of his earlier virtues, and 
in fact striving to make the most of him, a very gentle mon- 
ster : Galba throwing in sarcastically, blacker shadows. After 
disputation, the father and lovers walk off, leaving Galba 
alone for a moment's soliloquy : and, from behind the termi- 
nal altar, unseen Sibyl hails him Caesar ; he, astonished at 
the airy voice so coincident with his own feelings, thinks it 
ideal, chides his babbling thoughts, and so forth: then enter 
to him suddenly chance-met noble citizens, burnt out of 
house and home, who declaim furiously against Xero. Sibyl, 
still unseen from behind the altar, again hails Galba as 
future Caesar ; who no longer doubting his ears, and all pre- 
sent taking the omen, they conspire at the altar with drawn 
swords, and as the Sibyl suddenly presides, — tableau, — and 
down drops the soft green baize. This first act, you per- 
ceive, is stirring, introductory of many characters ; and the 
picture of the seven-hilled-city seen in a transparent blaze 
might give the followers of Stanfield a triumph. 

Second : the senate scene, producing another monstrous 
crime of Nero's, also inaccurately dated. In the full august 



54 NERO; 

assembly, Nero discovered enthroned, not unmajestic in de- 
portment, yet effeminately chapleted, and holding a lyre: 
suppose him just returned from Elis, a pancratist, the world's 
acknowledged champion. Nattalis, ever foremost in flat- 
teries, after praising the prince's exploits in Greece, avows 
that, like Paris in Troy, and Alexander at Persepolis, Nero 
had gloriously fired Rome; he found it wood, and wished to 
leave it marble ; (so, the catafalque at the Invalides of the 
twice-buried Corsican ;) in destroying as well as blessing, he 
had asserted his divinity ; and after due allusions to Phoe- 
nixes, and firekingships, and coups-de-soleil falling from the 
same Apollo so great upon the guitar, Nattalis moves that 
Nero should be worshiped, and calls on the priest of Jupiter 
to set a good example. None dare refuse, and the Senate 
bend before him ; whereupon enter, in clerical procession, 
augurs, and diviners, men-at-arms with poleaxes, and coro- 
naled white bulls, paraded before sacrifice : all this pandering 
to present love of splendor and picturesque effect. In the midst 
of these classical preparations enters, with a bevy of attend- 
ants, the haughty queen-like Agrippina, whom Nero, having 
sent for to complete his triumph, commands to bend too ; but 
she stoutly refusing, and taking him fiercely to task, objur- 
gating likewise Rome's degenerate graybeards, — great bus- 
tle, — senate broken up hurriedly, — and she, with a " feri 
ventrem," dragged off to be killed by her son's order. Nero 
alone with Nattalis by imperial command ; his momentary 
compunction nullified by the wily Iago, who turns off the 
subject smoothly to a new object of desire : Publius was the 
only senator not in his place, — and Publius has a daughter, 
the fairest in Rome, Lucia, — had not the emperor noticed 
her among Agrippina's women ? — Nero, charmed with any 
scheme of novelty that may change remorseful thoughts, is 



A TRAGEDY. 55 

induced, nothing loth, to attempt the subtle abduction of the 
heroine : a body-guard, headed as always by Manlius, ready 
in the vestibule to escort hirn, and exit. Xattalis, alone for 
a minute, betrays his own selfish schemes concerning Lucia, 
who had refused him before, and alludes to his secret reasons 
for urging: on the maddened Xero to the worst excesses. 

Third scene (or part, or ad, if it must be so), expounds, in 
fitting contrast to the foregoing, the tender loves of Lucia 
and Manlius ; a gentle home-scene, a villa and its terraced 
gardens : also, as Lucia is a Christian, we have, poetically, 
and not puritanically, an insight into her scruples of con- 
science as to the heathenism of her lover : and also into his 
consistent nobility of character, not willing to surrender the 
religion of his fathers unconvinced. To them rashes in 
Publius, who has been warned by friend Galba of the near 
approach of Nattalis and a guard, to seize Lucia for disre- 
putable Xero : no possible escape, and all urge Lucia to 
imitate Virginia, Lucretia, and others of like Dian fame, by 
cowardly self-murder; she is high-principled, and won't : then 
they, the father and lover, request leave to kill her; conflict- 
ing passions and considerable stage effect, Lucia, who with 
calm courage derides the dastard sacrifice, standing unharmed 
between those loving thirsty swords: in a grand speech she 
makes her quiet departure a test of Manlius 5 love, and her 
ultimate deliverance to be a proof to him that her God is the 
true God, the God who guards the innocent. Manlius, struck 
with her martyr-like constancy, professes that if indeed she 
is saved out of this great trouble, he will embrace her faith, 
renounce his own, and so break down the only difference 
between them : just after which, Xattalis and guard burst in ; 
then ensue much scornful parley, and a storm of quarrel, 
which Lucia allays, and she walks off confident in virtue. 



56 NERO; 

Publius and Manlius left alone in despair, until — bright 
thought — the latter considers that, as Nero's body-captain, 
he can always hover round the safety of his beloved ; and 
though his soldier's oaths, and notions of sacred sovereignty, 
forbid him to slay Nero, yet he comforts himself with the 
thought that in the last resort of unavoidable dishonor, he 
can rush in and kill his own Lucia. 

The fourth scene is a climacter, as old Browne would say, 
— the heroine's extremity: Nero's golden house, the roof 
rolling like the spheres to soft music, and a gorgeous marble 
avenue, ending with the colossal statue of the emperor, of 
gold, with incense burning before it: a scene, true to history, 
that might pale Aladdin's lamp, and dazzle the eyes of the 
groundlings : consider well then this my possible tragedy, ye 
that cater for theatric banquets. Lucia discovered alone, soli- 
loquizing : suddenly enters, unattended, the buskined Nero ; 
[who was believed to have been then out hunting with Nat- 
talis on a new white steed which the favorite had to serve 
his purpose given him, but had stolen secretly from the chase, 
as he wisely tells Lucia, to track up fairer game.] A grand 
scena between them, to be managed with as much delicacy 
as possible, of fawning entreaty, indignant refusal, imperious 
command and dignified rebuke, ending in Nero forcibly 
seizing her, and Lucia's involuntary ejaculation c that the 
God of the Christians might protect her :' at this word, Nero's 
love is turned into burning hate; he falls into one of Ma- 
cready's magnificent passions, and, howlingforhisbody-guard, 
he commits Lucia, as an odious victim for the stake, uncon- 
scious of their acquaintance, into thehandsof Manlius! — Nero, 
considerably disgusted, retires alone to a tapestried couch at 
the side : — and now, — all due care being taken to prevent the 
incident being farcical, — in creeps Nattalis also secretly from 



A TRAGEDY. 57 

the chase, merry at having outwitted Nero on that runaway 
white hunter ; of course he proceeds to make sure of his 
presumably sleeping prize, the fair Lucia ; so, much praising 
his lucky stars, he draws the envious tapestry,— and— only 
conceive the huge fracas between Nero and Nattalis, the strug- 
gle of two such demons ! They cross swords, and while 
fighting furiously, in rushes a guard, and, Nero being 
wounded, Nattalis escapes in the scuffle, and, like all other 
disappointed friends, assumes the metamorphosis of his dead- 
liest enemy. 

Fifth scene : the Sibyl's cave, a fine bit of witchcraft-rites, 
and moonlight in the neighborhood of lake Avernus. Galba 
and conspirators are met together by appointment ; reasona- 
ble complaints against Nero's crimes, crowned by the murder 
of his mother, the burning of Rome, and (after having openly 
avowed it, and sung the fall of Ilium to its crackling accompa- 
niment), his excessive lying meanness in now accusing those 
poor fools, the Nazarenes. Incantations meanwhile brewing 
with witch in the rear. Enters disheveled Nattalis, with 
bloody sword, at first to their infinite consternation, soon 
changed to joy. He is sworn among them, although they dis- 
trust him, and secretly resolve that he and Nero shall die to- 
gether, as master and man should : moreover, the Sibyl, who 
lets out her private reasons for this by accusing, in a strain 
of retributive justice, Nattalis of having ruined heretofore 
her own two daughters, and driven her— her, a highborn Ro- 
man matron, — to be the thing she now is for vengeance-sake, 
oracularly denounces him to die simultaneously with Nero. 
The rascal shows his cowardly nature by humiliating pray- 
ers, and miserably repents his double treachery : but those 
Tartars will not let him go, the conspirators keep him in 
their well-armed company ; so he wretchedly foresees his 



58 NERO; 

fate, and resolves, as some last act of what he considers vir- 
tue, to die, since he must, in ridding the world of that mon- 
ster, the emperor. 

The sixth is a palace scene, with a throne behind : Nero 
discovered alone, a victim to horrible remorse, and half re- 
solved to turn penitent ; the voice of his mother's ghost heard 
at intervals, as torturing his conscience, and speaking close 
to him, palpably though unseen. The murder of his kind 
old tutor, Seneca, also afflicting him ; to say nothing of poor 
Poppaea. His fears of solitude, and equal dread of company, 
incidentally revealing that under his imperial vest he wears 
secret armor ; for, now that Nattalis has failed him, whom 
can he trust? some traits of human kindness, even to tears, 
in his recollections of Nattalis. A courtier, after this, an- 
nounces that Publius demands audience of the emperor: the 
court come in, Nero assumes state, mounts the throne, and 
enter Publius. A most heart-rending intercession of the 
father for his daughter's life, which Nero's iron heart, cha- 
grined at his discomfiture, derides: this failing, Publius 
changes his tone, and, with many hints of what he an old 
man has gained in wisdom by his years, and especially 
(perhaps) of what he has heard from one Saul or Paul, a cap- 
tive, professes he can tell Nero of a New Pleasure, a secret 
he withholds if denied his daughter's life; the graphic de- 
scription of happiness to be gained thereby, rouses Nero's 
selfish curiosity; threats, cajolery, and promises of wealth 
and rank, are alike thrown away upon Publius ; at last the 
prince promises, and w T hen Publius, after a burst of earnest 
eloquence, proclaims the new pleasure to consist in showing 
mercy, — Nero's utter wrath, his hurricane of hate, revoking 
that hasty promise, and hurrying away old Publius to die at 
the same stake with his daughter. 



A TRAGEDY. 59 

Seventh : the catastrophe scene lies in the Coliseum Am- 
phitheatre; (I mean the older one, anterior to Vespasian's :) 
bloody games pictured behind, and those " human torches" 
at fiery intervals. Nero, enthroned in side front, surrounded 
by a brilliant court, amongst whom are some of the conspira- 
tors: at other side Publius and Lucia, tied at one stake in 
white robes, back to back, to die before Nero's eyes, Manlius 
and soldiers guarding them : he, Manlius, having nobly re- 
solved to test miraculous assistance to the last, but now trem- 
blingly believing the chance of a Providence interfering, since 
Lucia's escape from Nero at the golden house. Just as the 
emperor, after a sarcastic speech characteristically interlarded 
w T ith courtier conversation, is commanding the fagot to be 
lighted, and Lucia's constant faith has bade Manlius do it* 
— a rush of Nattalis with attendant conspirators and Rufa the 
Sibyl, up to Nero ; Nattalis strikes him, but the sword breaks 
short off on the hidden armor ; Nero's majestic rising, for a 
moment, asserting himself Caesar still, the inviolable majesty ; 
— suddenly stopped by a centripetal rush of the conspirators; 
who kill him, (after he has vainly attempted in despair to kill 
himself,) and Galba sits on the throne, while Nero unpitied 
and unhelped gasps out in the middle his dying speech. 
Meanwhile, at other side, Manlius has killed Nattalis for his 
treachery, cut the bonds of Publius and Lucia, and all ends 
in moral justice for the triumph of good, and the defeat of 
evil ; Manlius and Lucia hand in hand, Publius with white 
head and upraised hands blessing them, Nero a mangled 
corpse, Nattalis in his dying agonies persecuted by the vin- 
dictive Rufa, and Galba hailed Csesar by the assembled 
Romans. So, upon a magnificent tableau, slowly falls the 
lawny curtain. 

Patient reader, what think you of my long-winded tragedy? 



60 NERO; A TRAGEDY. 

— no quibbling about Nero having really died in a drain, 
four years after the murder of Agrippina; no learned disqui- 
sitions, if you please, as to his innocence of Rome's fire, a 
counterpart to our slander on the Papacy in the matter of 
London's ; spare me, I pray you, learned pundit, your sus- 
picions about Galba's too probable alibi in Spain. Tell me 
rather this ; do I falsify history in anything more important 
than mere accidental anachronisms and anatopisms ? do I 
make an untrue delineation of character, blackening the good, 
or whitewashing the wicked? Do I not, by introducing 
Nero's three greatest crimes so near upon his assassination, 
merely accelerate the interval between causes and effect? 
And is not tragic dignity justified in varnishing, with other 
compost than the dregs of Rome, the exit of the last true 
Csesar of the Augustan family? For all the rest, good 
manager, provide me actors, and I am even now uncertain, 
— such is my weakness, — whether this skeleton might not, at 
some time be clad with flesh and skin, and a decent Roman 
toga. I fear it will yet haunt me as a Midsummer Night's 
dream, destroying my quiet with involuntary shreds and 
patches of long-metred blank; the notion is still vivacious, 
albeit scotched : Alexandrine though the synopsis appear, it 
must not be thrown on the highroad as a dead snake ; nay, 
let me cherish it yet on my hearth, and not hurl it away like 
a bonum waviatum ; a little more boiling up of Roman 
messes in my brain, and my tragedy might flow forth spon- 
taneous as lava. What, if this book be, after all, a sort of 
pilot balloon, to show my huge Nassau the way the wind 
blows, — a feeler as to which and w T hich may please? — 
Whether or not this be so, I will still confess on, emptying 



OPIUM; A HISTORY. 61 

my brain of booklets, and, if by happy possibility I can keep 
ray secret, shall hear unsuspected, friend, your verdict. 



I must rather hope, than expect, that my next bit of pos- 
sible authorship is not like the last, a subject forestalled. 
Scribbling as I find myself for very listlessness in a dull 
country-house, there's not a publisher's index within thirty 
miles ; so, for lack of evidence to the contrary, I may legiti- 
mately, for at least a brief period of self-delusion, imagine 
the intoxicating field my own. And yet so fertile, important, 
interesting a subject cannot have been quite overlooked by 
the corps of professed literary laborers ; the very titlepage 
would ensure five thousand readers, (especially with a Bruns- 
wicker death's-head and marrow-bones added underneath.) 

OPIUM: 

A HISTORY: 

standing alone in single blackiness: Opium, a magnificent 
theme, warranted to fill a huge octavo: and certain, from 
sheer variety of information, to lead into the captivity of 
admiring criticism minds of every calibre. Its natural his- 
tory, with due details of all manner of poppies, their indi- 
genous habitats, botanical characters, ratios of increase, and 
the like ; its human history, discovery as a drug, how, when, 
where, and by whom cultivated; dissertations as to the pos- 
sibility of Chaldsean, Pharaonic, Grecian, or Roman opium- 
eating, with most erudite extracts out of all sorts of scribes 
from Sanchoniathon down to Juvenal, on these topics ; its 
medicinal uses, properties, accidents, and abuses ; as to 
whether it might not be used homceopathically or in infi- 



62 OPIUM ; 

nitesimal doses, to infuse a love of the pleasures of imagina- 
tion into clodpoles, lawyers' clerks, and country cousins; its 
intellectual possibilities of usefulness, stimulating the brain ; 
its moral ditto, allaying irritability; together with a dreadful 
detail of its evils in excess, idiotizing, immoralizing, ruining 
soul and body. Plenty of stout unquestionable statistics 
from all crannies of the globe to corroborate all the above 
to the extreme satisfaction of practical men, with causes and 
consequences of its insane local popularity. All this more- 
over, at present, with especial reference to China and the 
East; added to the moral bearings of the Opium-war, and 
our national responsibilities relative to that unlucky traffic. 
The metaphysical question stated and answered, w T hether or 
not prohibition of anything does not lead to its desire; 
showing the increasing appetency of those sottish Series for 
the forbidden vice, and illustrating Gay's fable of the foolish 
young cock, who ne'er had been in that condition, but for 
his mother's prohibition : moreover, how is it, that so cap- 
tivating a form of intoxication is so little rife among our 
drunken journeymen? queries, however, as to this; and 
whether or not the humbug of Teetotalism (a modern specu- 
lation got up by and for the benefit of grocers and sugar- 
planters on the one side, schismatics and conspiring dema- 
gogues on the other), has already substituted opium-eating, 
drinking, or smoking, for the wholesomer toddies, among 
factory folk and the finest pisantry. Millions of anecdotes 
regarding Eastern Rajahs, Western Locofocos, Southern 
Moors, and North country Muscovites as to the drug in its 
abuses : strange cures (if any) of strange ailments of mind 
or body by its prudent use : how T to wean men and nations 
from those deleterious chewings and smokings ; with true 
and particular accounts of such splendid self-conquests as 



A HISTORY. 63 

Coleridge, and De Quincey, and — shall I add another, a liv- 
ing name, — have attained to. Then, again, what a field for 
poetical vagaries, and madnesses of imagination, would be 
afforded by the subject of opium-dreams! Now, strictly 
speaking, in order to hallucinate honestly, your opium-writer 
ought to have had some practical knowledge of opium- 
eating : then could he descant, with the authority of expe- 
rience, — yea, though he write himself thereby down an ass, 
— on its effects upon mind and body; then could he tell of 
luxuries and torments in true Frenchified detail ; then could 
he expound its pains and pleasures with all the eloquence of 
personal conviction. But, as to such real risk of poisoning 
myself, and of making I wot not how actual a mooncalf, of 
my present sound mind and body, I herein would reasonably 
demur: and if I wanted dreams would tax my fancy, and 
not my apothecary's bill. Dreams? I need not whiff opium, 
nor toss off laudanum negus, to imagine myself — a young 
Titan sucking fiery milk from the paps of a volcano ; a 
Despot so limitless and magnificent, as to spurn such a pretty 
realm as the Solar System, with Cassiopeia, Bootes, and his 
Dog, to boot ; an Intellect so ravished, that it feels all flame ; 
or a mass of matter so inert, that it lies for ages in the silent 
depths of ocean, a lump of primeval metal: Madness, with 
the red-hot iron hissing in his brain ; Murder, with the blood- 
hound ghost, over land, over sea, through crowds, deserts, 
woods, and happy fields, ever tracking silently in horrid 
calmness; the oppression of indefinite Guilt, with that Holy 
Eye still watching ; the consciousness of instant Danger, the 
sense of excruciating Pain, the intolerable tyranny of vague 
wild Fear, without will or power to escape : spurring for 
very life on a horse of marble : flying upw r ard to meet the 
quick-falling skies, — that universal crash! — greeted in a 



64 OPIUM. 

new-entered world with the execrations of the assembled 
dead, that hollow far-echoing malicious laughter, that hurri- 
cane sound of clattering skulls; to be pent up, stifling like a 
toad, in a limestone rock for centuries; to be haunted, 
hunted, hooted, — to eat off one's own head with its cruel 
madly crunching under-jaw, to — but enough of horrors: — 
and as to delights, — all that Delcroix suggests of perfume, 
and Mahomet of Houris, and Gunter of cookery, and the 
German opera of music ; all Camilla-like running unexertive, 
all that sea-unicorns can effect in swift swimming, or storm- 
caught condors in things aerial, all the rapid travelings of 
Puck from star to star, system to system, all things beauteous, 
exhilarating, ecstatic; ages of all these things, warranted to 
last. Now, multiply all these several alls by forty-nine, and 
the product will serve for as exaggerated a statement as pos- 
sible of opium pandering to pleasure ; — yes, by forty-nine, 
by seven times seven at the least, that we be not accused of 
extenuating so fatal an excitement ; for it is competent to 
conceive one's self expanded into any unlimited number of 
bodies, seven sevens being the algebraic n, and if so, into 
their huge undefined aggregate; a giant's pains are throes 
indeed, a giant's pleasures indeed flood over. But, we may 
do harm to morality and truth, by falsely making much of a 
faint, fleeting, paltry excitation. The brain waltzing intoxi- 
cated, the heart panting as in youth's earliest affection, the 
mind broad and deep, and calm, a Pacific in the sunshine, the 
body lapped in downy rest, with every nerve ministering to its 
comfort; what more can one, merely and professedly of this 
world of sensualism — an opium eater for instance, — conceive 
of bliss ? — Such imaginative flights as these, with its pungent 
final interrogatory, suggestive to man's selfishness of joys 
as yet untried, might tempt to tamper with the dear delight; 



CHARLOTTE CLOPTON. 65 

whereas the plain statement of the most that opium could 
minister to happiness, as contrasted with those false vain 
views of it, remind me of Tennyson's poetical Timbuctoo, 
gorgeous as a New Jerusalem in Apocalyptic glories, and 
the mean filth-obstructed kraals dotted on an arid plain, 
to which, for very truthfulness, his soaring fancy drops 
plumbdown, as the shot eagle in Der Freischutz. 

Let this then serve as a meagre sketch of my defunct treat- 
ise on Opium : think not that I love the subject, curious and 
fertile though it be ; perhaps, philosophically regarded, it is 
not a better one than Gin; but ears polite endure not the 
plebeian monosyllable, unless indeed with a reduplicated n, 
as Mr. Lane will have it our whilom genie should be spelt: 
accordingly, I magnanimously give up the whole idea, and 
am liberal enough, in this my dying determination, to sign a 
codicil bequeathing Opium to my executors. 



Novelism is a field so filled with copyholders, so popu- 
lously tenanted in common, that it requires no light investi- 
gation to find a site unoccupied, and a hero or heroine wait- 
ing to be hired. Nevertheless, I seem to myself to have 
lighted on a rich and little cultivated corner; imagining that 
the subject is a good one, because still untouched, founded 
on facts, and with amplifiable variations that border on the 
probable. He that lionizes Stratford-on-Avon, will remem- 
ber in one of the Shakspearian museums of that classic town, 
the pictured trance of hapless 

CHARLOTTE CLOPTON, 

as it was limned in death-seeming life. He will be shown 
5 



66 CHARLOTTE CLOPTON 

the tombs of her ancient family in Stratford Church, and the 
door of that fatal vault ; he will hear something of her noble 
birth, her fine character, her fascinating beauty, her short 
innocent eventful life, her horrible death. Consider too the 
age and locality in which she lived, Elizabethan, Shaks- 
peare's ; the great cotemporary characters that might be 
casually introduced ; the mysterious suicide, in that dim 
dreadful pool, at the end of the terraced walk among the 
cropped yews, of her poor only sister, Margaret ; equaled only 
in miserable interest by that of Charlotte herself. And then 
for a plot ; some darkly-hinted parricide of years agone, in the 
generation but one preceding, has dropt its curse upon the 
now guiltless, but by the law of Providence, still not acquitted 
family ; a parricide consequent on passionate love, differing 
religions, and the Montague and Capulet school of hating 
feudal fathers, — Theodore Clopton having been a Catholic, 
Alice Beauvoir a Protestant ; an introductory recountal of old 
Beauvoir's withering curse on the Clopton family for Theo- 
dore's abduction of his daughter, followed by the tragic event 
of the father and son, Cloptons', mutual hatred, and the 
former found in his own park with the broken point of his 
son's sword in him, the latter flying the realm: the curse has 
slept for a generation ; and now two fair daughters are all 
that remain to the high-bred Sir Clement, and his despond- 
ing lady, on whom the Beauvoir descendant, a bitterest 
enemy, takes care to remind them the hovering curse must 
burst. This Rowland Beauvoir is the villain of the story, 
whose sole aim it is, after the fulfilment of his own libertine 
wishes, to see the curse accomplished : and Charlotte's love 
for a certain young Saville, whom Beauvoir hates as his hand- 
some rival in court patronage, as well as her pointed refusal 
of himself, gives new and present life to his ancestral grudge. 



A NOVEL. 67 

The lovers are espoused, and, to make Sir Clement's joy the 
greater, Saville has interest sufficient to meet the old knight's 
humor of keeping up the ancient family name, by getting it 
added to his own ; so that the Beauvoir hatred and parricidal 
curse seem likely to be frustrated. But — the first hindrance 
to their union is poor sister Margaret's secret and infatuated 
love for the scheming villain Rowland, her then too probable 
seduction, melancholic madness, and suicide; successively 
upon this follow the last illnesses and deaths of the heart- 
broken old people, whom Rowland's dreadful ubiquity terri- 
fies in their very chamber of disease ; and as the too likely 
consequence of such accumulated sorrows on a creature of 
exquisite sensibility, Charlotte, the only remaining heiress of 
that ancient lineage, gradually and with all the semblance of 
death falls into her terrible trance. Rowland, who, through 
his intimacy with Margaret, knows all the secret passages 
and sliding panels of the old mansion, and who thereby gets 
mysterious admission whenever he pleases, comes into that 
silent chamber, and finds Saville mourning over his dead- 
seeming bride: she, all the while, though unable to move, 
in an agony of self-consciousness ; and at last, when Rowland 
in fiendish triumph pronounces the curse complete, to the 
extreme horror of both, by an effort of tortured mind over 
apparently inanimate matter, Charlotte rolls her glazed eyes, 
and gives an involuntary groan: having thus to all appear- 
ance confirmed the curse, she lies more marble white, more 
corpselike, more entranced than ever. Then, after long 
lingering, draws on the horrible catastrophe ; a catastrophe, 
alas ! as far at least as regards the heroine, quite true. Fully 
aware of all that is going on, — the preparations for burial, 
the misery of her lover, the gratified malice of her foe, — she 
is placed in the coffin : the rites proceed, her heart-stricken 



68 CHARLOTTE CLOPTON ; 

espoused takes his last long leave, she is carried to the grave, 
locked in the family vault under Stratford Church, and there 
left alone, fearfully buried alive! And then, after a day or 
two, how shrieks and groans are heard in the churchyard by 
truant schoolboys, — and are placed to the account of the 
curse: how, at last, her despairing lover demands to have 
the vault opened; and the wretch Rowland, partly from 
curiosity, partly from malice, determines to be there to see. 
As they and some church-followers come near the door of the 
vault, they hear knockings, and desperate plunges within ; 
Saville swoons away, the crowd falls back in terror, and the 
hardened Rowland alone dares unlock the door. Instantly, 
in her shroud, mad, starved, with the flesh gnawed from her 
own fair shoulders, rushes out the maniac Charlotte: in fren- 
zied half-reason she has seized Rowland by the throat, with 
the strength of insanity has strangled him, — and then falls 
dead upon the steps of the vault! Of Saville, — who, as 
having swooned, is spared all this scene of horror, and who 
leaves the country for ever, — little or nothing is more said: 
and Clopton Hall remains a ruin, tenanted by ghosts and 
bats. 

P. S. If thought fit, after the fashion of Parisian charcoal- 
burners in ill-ventilated bedrooms, Charlotte may have re- 
corded her experiences in the vault, by writing with a rusty 
nail on the coffin-plates. 

Now, the gist of this Victor-Hugo tale of terror is its 
general truth : a true end of a truly named family, in its own 
neighborhood, and long-since extinct: the house, now T rebuilt 
and re-styled, — the vault, — the picture of that poor unfor- 
tunate, (how unsearchable in real life often are the ways 
of Providence ! how frequently the innocent suffer for the 
guilty!) — the gloomy w T ell, — and something extant of the 



A NOVEL. 69 

story, — remain still, and are known to some at Stratford. To 
do the thing graphically, one should go there, and gain mate- 
rials on the spot: and nothing could be easier than to mix 
with them fifteenth-and-sixteenth-century costumes, modes 
of thought, and historical allusions ; accessories of the humor- 
ous, if the age demands it, might relieve the pathetic ; Char- 
lotte's own innocence and piety might be made to soften her 
hard fate, with the assurance of a better life ; Saville might 
become a wisely resigned recluse ; and while the sins of the 
fathers are not gently, though justly, visited on the children, 
the villain of the story meets his full reward. 

Behold, then, hungry novel-monger, what grist is here for 
the mill! Behold, Sosii, what capabilities of orders from 
every library in the kingdom! — As doomed ones, and de- 
nounced ones, and undying ones, and unseen ones, seem to 
be such taking titles, what think you of the Buried-alive-one? 
— is it not new, thrilling, terrible? Who is he that would 
pander to the popular taste for details of dreadful, cruel, 
criminal, and useless abominations? " Should such an one 
as I ?" In emptying my head of the notion, I have ministered 
too much already; but the sample of henbane is poured out, 
an offering to the infernal manes, and poisons no longer the 
current of my thoughts. Thy ghost, poor beautiful Charlotte, 
shall not be disturbed by me ; thy misfortunes sleep w 7 ith 
thee. Nevertheless, this tale about a more amiable Charlotte 
than Werter's, so naturally also falling into the orthodox 
three-volume measure, is capable of being fabricated into 
something of deep, romantic, tragical interest : such a cha- 
racter, in such circumstances, in such an age, and such a 
place: I commend it to those of the Anglo-Gallic school 
who love the domestically horrible, and delight in unsunned 
sorrows : but, I throw not any one topic away as a waif, for 



70 CHARLOTTE CLOPTON; 

the casual passer-by to pick up on the highway. Shadows, 
indeed, are flung upon the waters, but Phulax still holds the 
substance with tenacious teeth. 

Stop awhile, my dog and shadow, and generously drop the 
world a morsel ; be not quite so bold when no one thinks of 
robbing you, and spare your gasconade : the expediency of 
a sample has been cleverly suggested, and we, ego et canis 
meus, royal in munificence, do graciously accede. Will this 
serve the purpose, my ever-pensive public ? at any rate, with 
some aid of intellect in readers, it is happily an extract which 
explains itself, — the death of poor infatuated Margaret : we 
will suppose preliminaries, and hazard the abrupt. 

" That bitter speech shot home; it had sped like an arrow 
to her brain: it had flown to her heart like the breath of pes- 
tilence : for Rowland to be rough, uncourteous, unkind, might 
cause indeed many a pang; but such conduct had long be- 
come a habit, and woman's charitable soul excused morose- 
ness in him, whom she loved more than life itself, more than 
honor. But now, when the dread laugh of a seemingly more 
righteous world was daily, hourly, to be feared against her, 
— when the cold finger of scorn was preparing to be pointed 
at her fading beauty, and her altered form, — now, when 
indulgence is most due, and cruelty has a sting more scor- 
pion than ever, to be taunted by that once kind tongue with 
having rightfully inherited a curse, — to be told in a sort of 
fiendish triumph that some ancient family grudge, forsooth, 
against her father's fame, certainly as much as the selfish 
motives of a libertine professed, had warped the w T ill of 
Rowland to her ruin, — to know, to hear, yea from his own 
lips, that the oft-repented crime of her warm and credulous 
youth, of her too free unsuspicious affection, had calmly been 



A NOVEL. 71 

contrived by the heart she clung to for her first, her only love, 
— here was misery, here was madness! 

" Rowland, at the approach of footsteps, had hastily slunk 
away behind the accustomed panel, and alone in the cham- 
ber was left poor Margaret : his last sneering speech, the 
mockery of his sarcastic pity, were still haunting her ear 
with echoes full of wretchedness ; and she had uttered one 
faint cry, and sunk swooning on a couch, when her sister 
entered. 

" Charlotte, gentle Charlotte, had nothing of the hardness 
of a heroine; her mind, as her most fair body, was delicate, 
nervous, spiritualized ; but the instinct of imperious duty 
ever gave her strength in the day of trial. Long with an 
elder sister's eye had she w r atched and feared for Margaret; 
she had palliated natural levity by evident warmth of dispo- 
sition, and excused follies of the judgment by kindness of 
the heart. Charlotte was no child ; in any other case she 
had been keener of perception ; but in that of a young gene- 
rous, and most loving sister, suspicion had been felt as a 
wickedness and had long been lulled asleep : now, however, 
it awaked in all its terrors; and, as Margaret lay fainting, the 
sorrowful condition of one soon to be a mother who never 
was a wife, was only too apparent. She touched her, sprin- 
kled w T ater on her pale face, and, as the fixed eyes opened 
suddenly, Charlotte started at their strange wild glare: they 
glittered with a freezing brilliancy, and stared around with 
the vacuity of an image: — could Margaret be mad? She bit 
her tender lips with sullen rage, and a gnashing desperation ; 
her cheek was cold, white, and clammy as the cheek of a 
corpse ; her hair, still woven with the strings of pearl she 
often wore, hung down loose and disheveled, except that 
on her flushing brow the crisp curls stood on end, as a nest 



72 CHARLOTTE CLOPTON; 

of snakes. And now a sudden thought seemed to strike the 
brain ; her eyes were set in a steady horror ; slowly, with 
dread determination, as if inspired by some fearful Being 
other than herself, uprose Margaret; and, while her fright- 
ened sister shuddering fell back, she glided, still gazing on 
vacancy, to the door : so, like a ghost through the dark cor- 
ridor, down those old familiar stairs, — and away through the 
Armory-hall ; Charlotte now more calmly following, for her 
father's library, where his use was to study late, opened out 
of it, and surely the conscience-stricken Margaret was going 
in her penitence to him. But see, she has silently passed by, 
— her hand is on the lock of the hall-door, — with one last 
look of despairing, recklessness behind her, as taking an 
eternal leave of that awe-struck sister, the door turns upon 
its hinge, and she, still with slow solemnity, goes out. 
Whither, oh God ! — whither ? The night is black as pitch, 
rainy, tempestuous ; the old knight's guests at Clopton Hall 
have gladly and right wisely preferred even such question- 
able accommodation as the Blue Chamber, the dreary white 
apartment looking on the moat, — nay, the haunted room of 
the parricide himself, — to encountering the dangers and 
darkness of a night-return so desperate ; but Margaret, in 
her gayest evening attire, near upon so foul a midnight in 
November, stalks like a spectre down the splashy steps. 
Charlotte follows, calls, runs to her, — but cannot rescue from 
some settled purpose, horribly suggested, that gentle fearful 
creature now so changed: suddenly in the dark she has lost 
her, — which way did the maniac turn ? — whither in that 
desolate gloom shall Charlotte fly to find her? — guided by 
the taper still twinkling in her father's study, she rushes back 
in terror to the hall ; and then — Help, help! — torches, torches! 
The household is roused, dull lanterns glance among the 



A NOVEL. 73 

shrubberies; pine-lights, ill-shielded from wind and rain by 
cap or cloak, are seen dotting the park in every direction, 
and dance about through the darkness, like sportive wild- 
fires: — Sir Clement in moody calmness looks prepared for 
anything the worst, like a man who anticipates evil long- 
deserved ; the broken-hearted mother is on her knees at the 
cold door steps striving to pierce the gloom with her eyes, 
and ejaculating distracted prayers : and so the live-long night, 
— that night of doubt, and dread, and dreariness, — through 
bitter hours of confusion and dismay, they sought poor Mar- 
garet, — and found her not ! 

11 But, with morning's light came the awful certainty. At the 
end of a terraced walk, mournfully shaded by high-cropped 
yews, stood an arbor, and behind it, half hidden among rank 
weeds, was an old half-forgotten fountain; there, on many a 
sultry summer night had Rowland met with Margaret, and 
there had she resolved in terrible remorse to perish. With 
the seeming forethought of reason, and the resolution of a 
frenzied fortitude, she had bound a quantity of matted weeds 
about her face, and twisted her hands in her fettering gar- 
ments, that the shallow pool might not in cruel kindness fail 
to drown her ; she lay scarcely half immersed in those waters 
of death; a few lazy tench floating sluggishly about, ap- 
peared to be curiously inspecting their ghastly uninvited 
guest ; and the fragments of an enameled miniature, with 
some torn letters in the handwriting of Rowland Beauvoir, 
were found scattered on the overflowing margin of the pool." 

Well, unkindly whelp, if your bone has no pickings better 
than this, not a cur shall envy you the sorry banquet. Yet, 
had my genius been better educated in the science of French 
cookery, this might have been served up with higher season- 
ing as a savory ragout : but you get it in simplicity, scarce 



74 THE MARVELOUS ; 

grilled; and in sooth, good world, it is easier to sneer at a 
novel than to imagine one ; and far more self-complacency 
may be gained by manfully affecting to despise the novelist, 
than by adding to his honors in the compliment of humble 
imitation. 



Things supernatural have everywhere and everywhen 
exercised mortal curiosity. Fear and credulity support the 
arms of superstition, fierce as city griffins, rampant as the 
lion and the unicorn; and forasmuch as no creature, Nelson 
not excepted, can truly boast of having never known fear, 
and no man also, from polite Voltaire, shrewd Hume, Levia- 
than Hobbes, and erudite Gibbon, down to the most stultified 
Van-Diemanite, can honestly swear himself free from the in- 
fluence of some sort of faith, for thus much the marvelous 
and the terrible meet with universal popularity. Now, one 
or two curious matters connected with those " more things in 
heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philo- 
sophy," which have even occurred to mine own self, (where- 
of, to gratify you, shall be a little more anon,) have hereto- 
fore induced me to touch upon sundry interesting points, 
which, like pikemen round their chief, throng about the topic 
of 

THE MARVELOUS. 

A book, so simply titled, with haply underneath a gigantic 
note of admiration between two humbler queries, CJ? w 7 ould 
positively, my worthy publisher, make your worship's fortune. 
For it should concern ghosts, dreams, omens, coincidences, 
good-and-bad luck, warnings, and true vaticinations : no 



A HANDBOOK. 75 

childish collection however of unsupported trumpery, but 
authenticated cases staidly evidenced, and circumstantially 
detailed ; no Mother Goose-cap's tales, no Dick the plough- 
man's dreams, no stories from the Terrific Register, nor 
fancies of hysterical females in Adult asylums ; even Merlins, 
witchfinders, and Taliesins should be excluded : and, in lieu 
of all such commonplaces, I should propose an anecdotic 
treatise in the manner scientifical. Macnish's Philosophy 
of Sleep, Scott's Demonology, treatises on Apparitions, and 
many a rare black-letter alchemical pamphlet might lend us 
here their aid; the British Museum is full of well-attested 
ghost-stories, and there are very few old ladies unable to add 
to the supply: then, this ghost department might be climaxed 
by the author's own experience, forasmuch as he is ready to 
avouch that a person's fetch was heard by many, and seen 
by some, in an old country-house, a hundred miles away 
from the place of death, at the instant of its happening. 

As to omens, aforesaid witness deposes that the sceptre, 
ball, and cross were struck by lightning out of King John's 
hand, in the Schools quadrangle at Oxford, immediately on 
the accession of William the Reformer ; and all the world is 
conusant that York Minster, the Royal Exchange, and the 
Houses of Parliament were destroyed by fire near about the 
commencement of open hostility, among ruling powers, to 
our church, commerce, and constitution ; and I myself can 
tell a tale of no less than eight remarkable warnings happen- 
ing in one day to a poor friend, who died on the next, which 
none could be expected to believe unless I delivered it on 
oath as having been an eyewitness to the facts. Dreams 
also, — strange, vague mysterious word ; there is a gloomy- 
look in it, a dreary intonation that makes the very flesh creep : 
the records of public justice will show many a murder re- 



76 PSYCHOTHERION 

vealecl by them, as instance the Red Barn ; more than one 
poor client in the clutch of a " respectable" attorney has been 
helped to his rights by their influence ; from Agamemnon 
and Pilate, down to Napoleon, the oppressors of mankind 
have in those had kindly warning. Dreams, — how many 
million false and foolish, for the one proving to be true ; but 
that one how clear, determinate, and lasting, as ministered 
by far other agency than imagination taking its sport while 
reason slumbers! Who has not tales to tell of dreams? A 
warning not to go on board such and such a ship — which 
founders ; a strange unlikely scene fixed upon the mind, con- 
cerning friends and circumstances miles away, exactly in the 
manner and at the time of its occurrence ; the foreshown 
coming of an unexpected guest ; the portrayed visage of a 
secret enemy : these, and others like these, many can attest, 
and I not least. And of other marvels, though here left un- 
considered, yet might much be said : truths so strange, that 
the pages of Romance would not trench on such extrava- 
gance ; combinations so unlikely, that thrice twelve cast 
successively by proper dice, were but probability to those. 
Thus, in authorial fashion, has the marvelous dwelt upon my 
mind ; and thus would I suggest a handbook thereof to cater- 
ing booksellers and the insatiable public. 



Against bears in a stage-coach, pointers in a drawing-room, 
lap-dogs in a vis-a-vis, and monkeys in a lady's boudoir, my 
love of comfort and propriety enters strong protest ; an eman- 
cipated parrot attracts my sympathy far less than bright-eyed 
children feeding their testy pet, for I dread the cannibal temp- 
tation of those soft fair finders, when brought into collision with 
Polly's hook and eye; gigantic Newfoundlanders dragging 



AN ARGUMENT. 77 

their perpetual chains, larks and linnets trilling the faint song 
of liberty behind their prison bars, cold green snakes stewing 
in a schoolboy's pocket, and dormice nestling in a lady's 
glove summon my antipathies ; a cargo of five hundred pigs, 
with whom I had once the honor of sailing from Cork to 
London, were far from pleasant as compagnons de voyage ; 
neither can I sleep with kittens in the room. Nevertheless 
no one can profess truer compassion, truer friendship (if you 
will) for the animal creation: often have I w T alked on in 
weariness, rather than increase the strain upon the Rozinantes 
of an omnibus; and my greatest school scrape was occasioned 
by thrashing the favored scion of a noble house for cruelty to 
a cat. Such and suchlike — for we learn from iEsop (Fable 
88 to wit) that trumpeters deserve to be unpopular, — is my 
physical zeal in the cause of poor dumb brutes : nor is my 
regard for them the less in matters metaphysical. Bishop 
Butler, we may all of us remember, in the Analogy, argues 
that the objector against man's immortality must show good 
cause why that which exists, should ever cease to exist; and, 
until that good cause be shown, the weight of probability is 
in favor of continual being. Now, for my part, I wish to be 
informed why this probability should not be extended to that 
innocent maltreated class, whom God's mercy made with 
equal skill, and sustains with equal care, as in the case of 
man, and — dare we add ? — of angels. Doth He not feed the 
ravens ? Do the young lions not gather what He giveth ? 
Doth a sparrow fall to the ground without Our Father? and 
is not the unsinning multitude of Nineveh's young children 
climaxed with " much cattle?" It is true, there maybe 
mighty difference between " the spirit of a man that goeth 
upward, and the spirit of a beast that goeth downward in the 
earth:" but mark this, there is a spirit in the beast; and as 



78 PSYCHOTHERION; 

man's eternal heaven may lie in some superior sphere, so 
that temporarily designed for the lower animals may be seen 
in the renovated earth. It is also true, that St. Paul, argu- 
ing for the temporal livelihood of Christian ministers from 
the type of " not muzzling the ox that treadeth out the corn," 
asks " Doth God care for oxen?" — or, in effect, doth He 
legislate (I speak soberly, though the sublime treads on the 
ridiculous), for a stable? — and the implication is, u To thy 
dutiful husbandry, man, such lesser cares are left." Sorry, 
righteously sorry, would it make any good man's heart to 
think that the Creator had ceased to care for the meanest of 
his creatures ; in a certain sense 

" He sees with equal eye, as God of all, 
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall :" 

and, assured that carelessness in a just Creator of his poor 
dependent creatures must be impossible, I submit that, criti- 
cally speaking, some laudable variation might be made in 
that text by the simple consideration that melei is not so 
strictly rendered u care for" as kedetai. Scripture, then, so 
far from militating against the possible truth that animals have 
souls, would seem, by a sidelong glance, to countenance the 
doctrine : and now let us for a passing moment turn and see 
what aid is given to us by Moral Philosophy. 

No case can be conceived more hard or more unjust than 
that of a sentient creature (on the hypothesis of its having no 
soul, no conscience, necessarily quite innocent), thrown into 
a world of cruelty and tyranny, without the chance of com- 
pensation for sufferings undeserved. Neither can any good 
government be so partial, as (limiting the w T hole existence of 
animals to an hour, a day, a year), to allow one of a litter to 



AN ARGUMENT. 79 

be pampered with continual luxuries, and another to be tor- 
tured for all its little life by blows, famine, disease, — and in 
its lingering death by the scientific scalpels of a critical Ma- 
jendie or a cold-blooded Spallanzani. Remember, that in 
the so-called parallel case of partialities among men, — the 
this-world's choice of a Jacob, the this-world's rejection of 
an Esau, — the answer is obvious ; there are two scales to the 
balance, there is yet another world. Far be it from us to 
think that all things are not then to be cleared up ; that the 
innocent little ones of Kedar and the exterminated Canaanites 
will not then be heard one by one, and no longer be mingled 
up indiscriminately in an overwhelming national judgment; 
that the pleas of evil education and example, of hereditary 
taint and common usage, will be then thrown aside as vain 
excuse; and that eventual justice will not with facility ex- 
plain every riddle in the moral government of God. But in 
the case of soulless extinguished animals, there is, there can 
be no compensation, no explanation; whether in pain or 
pleasure, they have lived and they have died forgotten by 
their Maker, and left to the casual kindness or cruelty of, 
towards them at least, irresponsible masters. How different 
the view opened to us by the possibility of soul being appor- 
tioned in various measure among the lower animals : there 
is a clue given u to justify the ways of God to" — brutes : we 
need not then consider, with a certain French Abbe, that 
they are fallen angels doing penance for their sins ; we need 
not, with old Pythagoras and latter Brahmins, account them 
stationed lodges, homes of transmigration for the spirits of 
men in process of being purged from their offences : we need 
not regard them as Avatars of Vishnu, or incarnations of 
Apis, visible deities craving the idolatries of India and Egypt. 
The truth commends itself by mere simplicity : nakedness 



80 PSYCHOTHERION; 

betrays its Evelike innocence of guile or error : those living 
creatures whom we call brutes and beasts, have, in their 
degree, the breath of God within them, as well as His handi- 
work upon them; and, candid theologian, tell me why, in 
that Millennium so long looked-for, when after a fiery purga- 
tion this earth shall have its sabbath, and when those who 
for a time were " caught up into the air," descending again 
with their Lord and his ten thousand saints, shall bodily 
dwell with others risen in the flesh for that happy season on 
this renovated globe, — tell me why there should not be some 
tithe of the animal creation made to arise again to minister in 
pleasure, as once they ministered in pain ? and for the rest, 
the other nine, what hinders them from tenanting a thousand 
happy fields in other of the large domains of space ? What 
hinders those poor dumb slaves from enjoying some emanci- 
pate existence — we need not perhaps accord them more of 
immortality than justice demands for compensation — for a 
definite time, a millennium let us think, in scores of those 
million orbs that twinkle in the galaxy ? 

Space stretches wide enough for every grain 
Of the broad sands that curb our swelling seas, 
Each separate in its sphere, to stand apart 
As far as Sun from Sun. 

Shall I then say what hinders? — the littleness of man's 
mind, refusing possibility of room for those countless quad- 
rillions; and the selfishness of his pride, scorning the more 
generous savage, whose doctrine (certainly too lax in liberal- 
ity), raises the beast to a level with mankind, and 

" Who thinks, admitted to that equal sky, 
His faithful dog shall bear him company." 



AN ARGUMENT. 81 

Truly, the Creator's justice, and mercy, and the majesty of 
his kingdom, give hope of after-life to all creation: Saint 
Antony of Padua did waste time in homilizing birds, beasts, 
and fishes ; but may they not find blessings, though ignorant 
of priests? — And now, suffer me in my current fashion, to 
glance at a few other considerations affecting this topic. It 
will be admitted, I suppose, that the lower animals possess, in 
their degree, similar cerebral or at least nervous mechanism 
with ourselves ; in their degree, I say, for a zoophyte a and 
caterpillar have brains, though not in the head ; and to this 
day Waterton does not know whether he shot a man or a 
monkey, so closely is his nondescript linked with either hand 
to the groveling Australian and the erect Orang Outang. 
Brutes are nerved as we are, and uncivilized man possesses 
instincts like them : all we can with any show of reason 
deny them is Moral Sense, and in our arbitrary refusal of 
this, and our summary disposal of w r hat we are pleased to 
term instinct, we take credit to ourselves for exclusive par- 
ticipation in that immaterial essence which is called Soul. 
But is it, in candor, true that brutes have no moral sense ? 
Obviously, since moral sense is a growing thing and ascend- 
ing in the scale of being, and since man is its chief receptacle 
on earth, we ought to be able to take the best instances of 
animal morals from those creatures which have come most 
within the influence of human example ; as pets of every 
kind, but mainly dogs. Does not a puppy, that has stolen a 
sweet morsel from some butcher's stall, fly, though none pur- 
sue him? Is a foxhound not conscience-stricken, for his 
harry of the sheep-fold? and who will deny some sense of 
duty, and no little strength of affection, in a shepherd's dog? 
Have not Cowper's now historic hares displayed an educated 
and unnatural confidence ; and many a gray parrot, though 



82 PSYCHOTHERION; 

limited in speech, said many a witty thing? — Again, read 
some common collection of canine anecdotes: what essential 
difference is there between the affectionate watch kept by 
man over his brother's bed of sickness, and that which has 
been known of more than one poor cur, whose solicitude has 
extended even to dying on his master's grave ? The soldier's 
faithful poodle licks his wounds upon the stormy battle-field ; 
and Landseer's colley-dog tears up the turf, and howls the 
shepherd's requiem. What real distinction can we make 
between a high sense of duty in the captain w T ho is the last 
to leave his sinking ship, and that in the watchful terrier, 
whom neither tempting morsels nor menaced blows can in- 
duce to desert the ploughman's smock committed to his care ? 
Once more : who does not recognize individuality of character 
in animals? A dog, or a horse, or a tame deer, or in fact 
any domesticated creature, will act throughout life in a cer- 
tain course of disposition, at least as consistently as most 
masters: it will also have its whims and ways, likings and 
dislikings, habits, fears, joys, and sorrows ; and verily in 
patience, courage, gratitude, and obedience, will put its 
monarch to the blush. 

»But upon this theme — meagre as the sketch may be, fan- 
ciful, illogical, — my cursory noticns have too long detained 
you. I had intended barely to have introduced a black-look- 
ing Greek composite, serving for name to an unwritten Essay 
which we will imagine in existence as 

PSYCHOTHERION, 

AN INCONCLUSIVE ARGUMENT 

ON 

THE SOULS OF BRUTES; 



AN ARGUMENT 



And my thoughts have run on thus far so little conclusively 
(I humbly admit to you), that we will, to save trouble, leave 
the riddle as unsolved as ever, and gain no better advantage 
than thus having loosely adverted to another fancy of your 
Author's mind. 



Not yet is my mind a simple freeman, a private unin- 
cumbered, individual self-possessor; its slaves are not yet 
all manumitted ; I lack not subjects ; I am no lord of depopu- 
lated regions; albeit my aim is indeed akin to that of old 
Rufus, and Goldsmith's tyrannical Squire of Auburn; I wish 
to clear my hunting-grounds, to make a solitude and call it 
peace. Slowly, but still surely, am I working out that will. 
Meanwhile, however, there is no need to advertise for heroes ; 
they are only too rife, clinging like bats to the curtains of my 
chambers of imagery, or with attendant satellites hanging in 
bunches, as swarming bees about their monarch, to the rafters 
of my brain. Selection is the hardest difficulty; here is the 
labor, here the toil; because for just selection there should 
be good reasons. Now, amongst other my multitudinous 
authorial projects, this perhaps is not the worst; namely, by 
a series of dissimilar novels, psychological rather than reli- 
gious, and for interest's sake laid in diverse ages and coun- 
tries, to illustrate separately the most rampant errors of the 
Papacy. For example, say that Lewis's Monk is a strong 
delineation of the evils consequent on constrained and un- 
chosen celibacy; though its coloring be meretricious, though 
its details offend the moralities of nature, still it is a book 
replete to thoughtful minds with terrible teaching,— Be not 
high-minded, but fear. In like manner, guilty thoughts 
dropped upon innocent young hearts in that foul corner, 



S4 THE CONFESSIONAL; 



THE CONFESSIONAL, 

might make a stirring tale, or haply a series of them : the 
cowled hypocrite suggesting crime to those whose answer is 
all innocence ; his schemes of ambition or avarice or lust, 
slowly elaborated by the fiend-like purposes to which he puts 
his ill-used knowledge of the human heart ; his sacrilegious 
violation of the holy grievings made by mistaken penitence. 
History should bring its collateral assistance : the Medicean 
Queens, Venice, bloody Spain, hard-visaged monks calmly 
directing the engines of torture, the poison of anonymous 
calumny, and dread secrets more dreadfully betrayed, could 
furnish much of truthful precedent. The bad obstructions 
placed between the sinner and his God by selfish priestcraft ; 
the souls that would return again, like Noah's weary dove, 
enticed by ravens to forsake the ark, mate with them, and 
feed on their banquet of corruption: the social, religious, 
philosophic, and eternal harms brought out in full detail ; 
the progress of this world's misery in the lives of the confess- 
ing, and of studious crime in the heart of the absolver : a 
scene laid among the high Alps, and the sunny plains they 
topple over ; the time, that of some murderous Simon 
de Montfort; the actors, Waldensian saints, and demon In- 
quisitors; the prominent characters, a plausible intriguing 
friar, (as of old a monk of Cluni,) whose ambition is the 
Popedom, and whose conscience has no scruple about means, 
bloody, bad, vindictive, atheistic; and then his victims, a 
youth that he trains from infancy to the sole end of poisoning, 
subtly and slowly, all who stand in his path ; a girl who loves 
this youth, and who, flying from the foul friar in the day of 
temptation, betakes her to the mountains, and ultimately 



A TALE. 85 

saves her lover from his terrible destination in guilt, by 
hiding him in her own haven of refuge, the persecuted little 
church; and with these materials to work upon, I need 
hardly detail to you an intricate plot and an obvious denoue- 
ment. 

This class of theme, it is probable, has exercised the 
talents of many ; but as the evils of confessing to deceitful 
man, and of blind trust in his deleterious advice, have not 
specifically met ray eye, the subject is new to me, and may 
be so to others. Still, I stay not now further to enlarge upon 
it; I must press on ; and will not cruelly encourage the birth 
of thoughts brought forth only to be destroyed, like father 
Saturn's babes, — the anthropophagite. 

A good reason for selection at last presents itself. Sundry 
collateral ancestors of mine [everybody from Cain downwards 
must have had ancestors ; so no quibbling, please, nor quar- 
reling about so exploded an absurdity as family-pride,] were 
lucky enough in days langsyne to appropriate to themselves 
amongst other matters a respectable allowance of forfeited 
monastic territory: and I know it by this token ; that in yon- 
der venerable chest of archives and muniments, rest in their 
own dust of ages, duly and clearly assorted, all those abbey 
deeds from the times of Henry Beauclerc. Here's a fine 
unlooked-for opportunity of making dull ancestral spots clas- 
sic ground famous among men ; here's a chance of immor- 
talizing the crumbling ruins of an obscure, but interesting, 
abbey-church; here's a fair field for dragging in all that one 
knows or does not know, all that parchments can prove or 
fancy can invent of redoubtable or reprobate progenitors, and 
investing the place of their possessions with a glory beyond 
heraldry. Much is on my mind of the desperate evils con- 
sequent on the Romish rule of idol-worship: and why not 



86 THE PRIOR OF MARRICK; 

lay my scene on the wild banks of the Swale, among the 
bleak rough moors that stand round Richmond, and the gul- 
lies that run between the Yorkshire hills ? why not talk about 
those names of gentle blood, familiar to the ear as household 
words, Uvedale and Scrope, Vavasour and Ratcliffe? why 
not press into the service of instructive novelism truths 
stranger than fiction, among characters more marked, and 
names of higher note, than the whole hot-pressed family of 
the Fitzes ? 

All this might be accomplished, were it worth the worry, in 

THE PRIOR OF MARRICK: 

and now for a story of idolatry. It seems an absurdity, an 
insanity ; it is one, — both ; but think it out: is it quite im- 
possible, quite incredible? let me sketch the outline of so 
strange infatuation. Our Prior was once a good man, an 
easy, kind, and amiable : he takes the cowl in early youth, 
partly because he is the younger son of an unfighting family, 
and must, partly because he is melancholy and will. And 
wherefore melancholy? There was brought up with him 
from the very nursery a fair girl, the weeping orphan of a 
neighboring squire, who had buckled on his harness and 
fallen in the wars : they loved, of course, and the deeper be- 
cause secretly and without permission : they were too young to 
marry, and indeed had thought little of the matter; still, sub- 
stance and shadowy body and soul, were scarcely more need- 
ful to each other, or more united. But — a hacking cough, 
— a hectic cheek, — a wasting frame, were to blue-eyed Mary 
the remorseless harbingers of death, and Eustace standing on 
her early grave was in heart a widower: henceforth he had 
no aim in life ; the cloister was — so thought he as many do 



AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 87 

— his best refuge to dream upon the past, to soothe his pre- 
sent sorrows, and to earn for a future world the pleasures lost 
in this. Time, the best anodyne short of what Eustace could 
not buy at Rome, true heart-healing godliness, alleviates his 
grief, and makes him less sad, but not wiser ; years pass, the 
desire of pre-eminence in his own small world has hitherto 
furnished incentives to existence, and he finds himself a 
Prior too soon ; for he has nothing more to live for. Yes, — 
there is an object; the turmoil of small ambition with its 
petty cares is past, and the now motiveless man lingers in 
yearning thought on the only white spot in his gloomy jour- 
ney, the green oasis of his desert life, that dream of early 
love. He has long loved the fair quiet image of our Lady of 
Marrick, unwittingly, for another Mary's sake ; half-oblivious 
of the past in scheming for the present, he has knelt at mid- 
night before that figure of the Virgin-mother, and knew not 
why he trembled; he thought it the ecstasy of devotion, the 
warm gushing flood of calmness which prayer confers upon 
care confessed. But now, — he sees it, he knows it; there 
is, indeed, good cause: how miraculously the white marble 
face grows into resemblance with hers ! the same sainted 
look of delicate unearthly beauty, the same white cheek, so 
still and unruffled even by a smile, the same turn of heavenly 
triumph on the lip, the same wild compassion in the eye! 
Great God, — he loves again! — that staid, grave, melancholy 
man loves with more than youthful fondness ; the image is 
now dearer than most sacred; there is a halo round it, like 
light from heaven : he adores its placid, eternal, changeless 
aspect; if it could move, the charm would half dissolve; 
he loves it, — as an image! And then how rapturously joins 
he with the wondering choir of more stagnant worshipers, 
while they yield to this substantial form, this stone-transmi- 



THE PRIOR OF MARRICK ; 

gration of his love, this tangible, unpassionate, abiding, pre- 
sent deity, the holy hymns of praise, due only to the unseen 
God ! How gladly he sings her titles, ascribing all excel- 
lence to her! How tenderly falls he at her feet with eyes 
lighted as in youth ! How earnestly he prays to this fixed 
image, — to it, not through it, for his heart is there! How 
zealously he longs for her honor, her worship among men, — 
hers, the presiding idol of that Gothic pile, the hallowed Lady, 
the goddess-queen of Marrick! Stop, — can he do nothing 
for her, can he venture nothing in her service ? Other shrines 
are rich, other images decked in gold and jewels; there is 
yet an object for his useless life, there are yet ends to be 
attained, ends — that can justify the means. He longs for 
wealth, he plots for it, he dares for it; he plans lying mira- 
cles, and thousands flock to the shrine ; he waylays dying 
men, and, by threatened dread of torments of the damned, 
extortionizes conscience into unjust riches for himself; he 
accuses the innocent, and reaps the fine; he connives at the 
guilty, and fingers the bribe. So wealth flows in, and the 
altar of his idol is hung with cloth of gold, her diadem is 
alight with gems, costly offerings deck her temple, bending 
crowds kneel to her divinity. Is he not happy ? Is he not 
content? Oh, no: an insatiate demon has possessed him ; 
with more than Pygmalion's insanity he loves that image ; 
he dreams, he thinks of that one unchanging form. The 
marveling brotherhood, credulous witnesses of such deep 
devotion, hold him for a saint; and Rome, at the wish of the 
world, sends him, as to a living St. Eustatius, the patent of 
canonization : they praise him, honor him, pray to him ; but 
he contemptuously — (and they take it for humility) — spurns 
a gift which speaks of any other heaven than the presence 
of that one, fair, beautiful, beloved statue. A thought fills 



AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 89 

him, and that with joy: he has heard of sacrifices in old 
time, immolations, offerings up of self, as the highest act of 
a devout worshiper; he cares not for earth nor for heaven ; 
and one night, in his enthusiastic vigils, the frenzy of idolatry 
arms that old man's own weak hand against himself, and he 
falls at the statue's feet, self-murdered, its martyr! 

Here were scope for psychology ; here were subtle un- 
windings of motive, trackings of reason, intricate anatomiza- 
tions of the heart. All ages, before these last in which we 
live, have been worshipers even to excess, — of u unknown 
gods," " too superstitious:" w r e, upon whom the ends of the 
world are fallen, may be thought to be beyond a danger into 
which the wisest of old time were entrapped: we scarcely 
allow that the Brahmin may notwithstanding be a learned 
man and a shrewd, when we see him fall before his monster ; 
we have not wits to understand how the Babylonian, Persian, 
Grecian, and Roman dynasties could be so besotted. For 
this superior illumination of mind let us thank not ourselves, 
but the Light of the world ; and, warned by the history of 
ages, let us beware how we place created things to mediate 
between us and the most High; let us be shy of symbolic 
emblems, of pictures, images, observances, lest they grow 
into forms that engross the mind, and fill it with a swarm of 
substantial idols. 

Now T , this tale of the Prior of Marrick would, but for the 
present premature abortion, have seen daylight in the form of 
an autobiography, — the catastrophe, of course, being added 
by some brother monk, who winds up all with his moral: 
and to get at this autobiographical sketch, — a thing of frag- 
ments and wild soliloquies, incidentally laying bare the heart's 
disease, and the poisonous breathings of idolatrous influence, 
— I could, easily and after the true novelist fashion, fabricate 



90 THE PRIOR OF MARRICK; 

a scheme, somewhat as follows : Let me go gayly to the 
Moors by rail, coach, or cart, say for a sportsman's pastime, 
a truant vicar's week, or an audit-clerk's holiday: I drop 
upon the ruined abbey, now indeed with scarcely a vestige 
of its former beauty remaining, but still used as a burial- 
place ; being a bit of an antiquary, I rout up the sexton, 
(sexton, cobbler, and general huckster,) resolved to lionize 
the old desecrated precinct: I find the sexton a character, a 
humorist ; he, cobbler-like, looks inquisitively at my caout- 
chouc shooting-shoes, and hints that he too is an artist in the 
water-proof line ; then follows question as how, and rejoinder 
as thus. Our sexton has got a name among his neighbors 
for his capital double-leather brogues, warranted to carry you 
dry-shod through a river; and, warmed by my brandy-flask 
and bonhomie, considering me moreover little likely to set 
up a rival shop, cunningly communicates his secret: he puts 
parchment between the leathers! — Parchment, — my good 
man, — w T here can you get your parchment hereabouts? I 
spoke innocently, for I thought only of ticketing some grouse 
for my friends southward : but the question staggered my 
sexton so sensibly, that I came to the uncharitable conclu- 
sion, — he had stolen it. And then follows confession, — 
how, among the rubbish in a vault, he had found a small 
oak chest, — broke it open, — no coins, no trinkets, u no no- 
thing," — except parchment ; a lot of leaves tidily written, 
and — warranted to keep out the wet. A few shillings and a 
tankard make the treasure mine, I promising as extra to send 
a huge bundle of ancient indentures in place of the precious 
manuscript. Thus, in the way of Mackenzie's Man of Feel- 
ing, we become fragmentary w T here we fear to be tedious; 
and so, in a good historic epoch, among the wars of the 
Roses, surrounded by friars and nuns, outlaws and border- 



THE SEVEN CHURCHES. 91 

riders, chivalrous knights and sturdy bowyers, consign I to 
the obliviscent firm of Capulet and Co. my happily destroyed 
Prior of Marrick. 



A crank boat needs ballast; and of happy fortune is it for 
a disposition towards natural levity, when educational gravity- 
has helped to steady it. Upon the vivacious, let the reflect- 
ive supervene: to the gay, suffer in its season the addition 
of the serious. Amongst other wholesome topics of medita- 
tion, — for wholesome it is to the healthy spirit, although of 
some little danger to the presumptuous and inflated,— the 
study of the sure word of Prophecy has more than once ex- 
cited the writing propensity of your Author's mind. On most 
matters it has been my fate, rather from habits of incurable 
reverie than from any want of opportunities, to think more 
than to read ; and therefore it is, with very due diffidence, 
that, as far as others and their judgments are concerned, I 
can ever hope to claim originality or novelty. To my own 
conscience, however, these things are reversed ; for contem- 
plation has produced that as new to my own mind, which may 
be old to others deeper read, and has thought those ideas 
original, which are only so to its own fancy. Very little, 
then, must such as I reasonably hope to add on Prophetical 
Interpretation ; the Universal Wisdom of two millenaries 
cannot be expected to gain anything from the passing thought 
of a hodiernal unit: if any fancies in my brain are really new 
and hitherto unbroached upon the subject, it can scarcely be 
doubted but that they are false ; so very little reliance do 
principles of Catholicity allow to be placed upon " private 
interpretations." 

With thus much of apology to those alike who will find, 



92 THE SEVEN CHURCHES ; 



and those who will not find, anything of novelty in my 
notions, I still do not withhold them. By here a little and 
there a little, is the general mind instructed : it would be 
better for the world if every mighty tome really contributed 
its grain. 

The prophecies of Holy Writ appear to me to have one 
great peculiarity, distinguishing them from all other prophe- 
cies, if any, real or pretended ; and that peculiarity I defer- 
entially conceive to be this; that, whereas all human prophe- 
cies profess to have but one true fulfilment, the divine have 
avowedly many true fulfilments. The former may indeed 
light upon some one coincidence, and may exult in the acci- 
dent as a proof of truth ; the latter bounds as it were (like 
George Herbert's sabbaths) from one, to another, and another, 
through some forty centuries, equally fulfilled in each case, 
but still looking forward with hope to some grander catas- 
trophe : it is not that they are loosely suited, like the Delphic 
oracles, to whatever may turn up, but that they by a felicitous 
adaptation sit closely into each era which the Architect of Ages 
has arranged. Pythonic divination may be likened to a loose 
bag which would hold and involve with equal ease almost 
any circumstance ; Biblical prophecy to an exact mould, into 
which alone, though not all similar in perfection, its own true 
casts will fit: or again, in another view of the matter, accept 
this similitude ; let the All-seeing Eye be the centre of many 
concentric circles, beholding equally in perspective the cir- 
cumference of each, and for accordance with human periods 
of time measuring offsegraents by converging radii: separately 
marked on each segment of the wheel within wheel, in the 
way of actual fulfilment, as well as type and antitype, will 
appear its satisfied word of prophecy, shining onward yet as 
it becomes more and more final, until time is melted in eter- 



A DISSERTATION. 93 



nity. Thus, it is perhaps not impossible that every interpre- 
tation of wise and pious men may alike be right and hold 
together; for different minds travel on the different periphe- 
ries. So our Lord (to take a familiar instance) speaks of his 
second advent in terms equally applicable to the destruction 
of one city, of the accumulated hosts at Armageddon, and of 
this material earth: Antiochus and Antichrist occur prospect- 
ively within the same pair of radii at differing distances ; and, 
in like manner and varying degrees, may, for aught we can 
tell, such incarnations of the evil principle as papal Rome, 
or revolutionary Europe, or infidel Cosmopolitism ; or again 
such heads of parties, such indexes of the general mind, as 
a Caesar, an Attila, a Cromwell, a Napoleon, a — whoever be 
the next. So also of hours, days, years, eras; all may and 
do co-exist in harmonious and mutual relations. Good men, 
those who combine prayer with study, need not fear neces- 
sary difference of result, from holding different views ; the 
grand error is too loosely generalizing ; a little circle suits 
our finite ken ; we cannot, as yet, mentally span the universe. 
These crude and cursory remarks may serve to introduce a 
likely-looking idea to which my thoughts have given enter- 
tainment, and which, with others of a similar sort, were 
once to have come forth in an essay-form, headed 

THE SEVEN CHURCHES; 

moreover, for aught that has come across my reading, to be 
additionally styled " A new interpretation, for these latter 
days." Without desiring to do other than quite confirm 
the literal view, as having related primarily to those local 
churches of old times, geographically in Asia Minor; with- 
out attempting to dispute that they may have an individual 



94 THE SEVEN CHURCHES; 

reference to varieties of personal character, and probably of 
different Christian sects; I imagine that we may discover, in 
the Apocalyptic prospect of these seven churches, an histo- 
rical view of Christianity from the earliest ages to the last; 
beginning as it did, purely, warmly, and laboriously, with 
the apostolic emblematic Ephesus, and to end with the 
" shall He find faith on the earth" of luke-warm Laodicea: 
thus Smyrna would symbolize the state of the church under 
Diocletian, the " tribulation ten days;" Pergamus, perhaps 
the Byzantine age, " where Satan's seat is" the Balaam and 
Balak of empire and priesthood ; Thyatira, the avowed com- 
mencement of the Papacy, u Jezebel," &c. ; Sardis, the 
dreary void of the dark ages, the " ready to die;" Philadel- 
phia, the rise of Protestantism, " an open door, a little 
strength ;" and Laodicea, (the riches of civilization choking 
the plant of Christianity,) its decline, and, but for the 
Founder's second coming, its fall ; if, indeed, this were pos- 
sible. 

The elucidation of these several hints might show some 
striking confirmations of the notion ; which, as everything 
else in this book, would humbly claim your indulgence, 
reader, for my sketches must be rapid, and their descriptions 
brief. Concurrently, however, with this, (which I know not 
whether any prophetic scholiasts have mentioned or not,) 
there may be deduced a still further interpretation, equally, 
as far as I am concerned, underived from the lucubrations of 
others. This other interpretation involves a typical view 
of the general characteristics of Christendom's seven true 
churches, as they are to be found standing at the coming of 
their Lord ; the Asiatic seven may be assimilated, in their 
religious peculiarities, with the national Protestant churches 
of modern Europe : what order should be preserved in this 



A DISSERTATION. 95 

assimilation, unless indeed it be that of eldership, it might be 
difficult to decide; but, excluding those communities which 
idol-worship has unchurched, and leaving out of view such 
anomalies as America presents, having no national religion, 
we shall find seven true churches now existing, between 
which and the Asiatics many curious parallels might be run: 
the seven are, those of England, Scotland, Holland, Prussia, 
perhaps Switzerland, Sweden, and Germany. Without pro- 
fessing to be quite confident as to the list, the idea remains 
the same : it is but a light hint on a weighty subject, demand- 
ing more investigation than my slender powers can at present 
compass. It is merely thrown out as undigested matter ; a 
crude notion let it rest: if ever I aspire to the dignity and 
dogmatism of a theological teacher, it must be after more and 
deeper inquiry of the Newtons, Faber, Frere, Croly, Keith, 
and other learned interpreters, than it is possible or proper 
to make in a hurry: volumes have been, and volumes might 
be again, written for and against any prophecy unfulfilled ; 
it is dangerous to teach speculations; for, if found false, they 
tend to bring holy truths into disrepute. Let me then put 
upon the shelf, as a humble layman should, my hitherto 
unaccomplished prophetical treatise ; and receive its mention 
for little more than my true revelation of another phase of 
authorship. 



And many like attempts have been hazarded by me in the 
mode theological ; though, from some cause or other, they 
have mostly fallen abortive. Were mention here made of the 
more completed efforts of your Author's mind, in this walk of 
literature, or of others, it might too evidently lay bare the mys- 
tery of my mask ; a piece of secret information intended not 



96 REVISION. 

as yet to be bestowed. But this book purporting to be the 
medley of my mind, the bona fide emptying of its multifa- 
rious fancies, must of necessity, if honest, portray all the 
wanings and waxings of an ever-changing lunar disposition: 
so, haply you shall turn from a play to a sermon, from a novel 
to a moral treatise, from a satire or an epigram to a religious 
essay. Such and so inconsistent is authorial man. Here 
then, in somewhat of order, should have followed lengthily 
various other writings of serious import, half-fashioned, and 
from conflicting reasons left — perhaps forever — half-finished. 
But considering the crude and apparently careless nature of 
this present book, and taking into account the solemn and 
responsible manner in which such high topics ought invari- 
ably to be treated, I have struck out, without remorse or 
mercy, all except a mere mention of the subjects alluded to. 
The contiguity of lighter matter demands this sacrifice ; not 
that I am one of those who deem a cheerful face and a prayer- 
ful heart incongruous: there is danger in a man, however 
religious, when his brow lowers, and his cheek is stern ; so 
did Cromwell murder Charles ; so did Mary (though bigoted, 
sincere), consign Cranmer to the flames, and Jane to the 
scaffold: innocence and mirth are near of kin, and the tear 
of penitence is no stranger to the laughter-loving eye. But 
I ramble as usual. Let it suffice to say, that in accordance 
with common prejudices, I suffer my mind to be shorn of its 
consecrated rays ; for albeit my moral censor has spared the 
prophetical ideas, and one or two other serious sobrieties, on 
the ground that, although they are mere hints, they are at all 
events hints of good, still more experimental and more hazard- 
ous pieces of biblical criticism have been not unwisely immo- 
lated. The full cause of this will appear in the mere title of 
the first of these half-attempted essays, viz., 



LAY SERMONS. 97 



THE WISDOM OF REVISION; 

whereof my predication shall be simply and strictly nil. 

The next piece of serious study, as yet little more than a 
root in my mind, was to have fructified in the form of 

HOMELY EXPOSITIONS, 

or domestic readings in Scripture for daily use in family wor- 
ship, with an easy, sensible, useful sort of commentary; a 
book calculated expressly for the understandings, wants, 
vices, temptations, and peculiarities of household servants, 
and quite opposed to the usual plans of injuriously raising 
doubts to lay them, of insisting upon obsolete Judaisms, of 
strict theological controversy, of enlarging to satiety on the 
meaning of passages too obvious to require explanation, and 
ingeniously slurring over those which really need it; indeed 
of pursuing the courses generally adopted by the mass of 
commentators. 

A further notion extended to 

LAY SERMONS, 

whereof are many written : their principal peculiarities con- 
sist in being each of a quarter-hour length, as little as possi- 
ble regarding Jews and their didactic histories, and, as much 
as might be, crowding ideas, and images, and out-of-the-way 
knowledge of all sorts into the good service of illustrating 
Gospel truths. 

Another religious Essay has been relinquished, although 
to a great degree effected, from the apprehension that it may 
7 



98 HEATHENISM j 

suggest matter fanciful or false; also, in part, from the mate- 
rial being perhaps of too slender a character to insist upon. 
Its name stood thus, 

SCRIPTURAL PHYSICS; 

being an attempt to vindicate the wisdom of Holy Writ in 
matters of natural science ; for example, cosmogony, geology, 
the probable centre of the earth, the vitality and circulation 
of the blood, hints of magnetism and electricity, a solar sys- 
tem, a plurality of worlds, the earth's shape, inclined axis, 
situation in space, and connection with other spheres, the 
separate existence of disembodied life, the laws of optics, 
much of recondite natural history: — all these can be easily 
proved to be alluded to in detached, or ingeniously com- 
pared, passages of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is very likely, 
however, that Huntington has anticipated some of this, 
although I have never met with his writings ; and a great 
deal more of it is mentioned in notes and sermons which 
many may have read or heard. Until, therefore, I become 
surer of neither invading the provinces of others, nor of 
detracting from their wisdom, let those ill-written fancies still 
lie dormant in my desk. 

A fifth tractate on things theological, still in the egg state, 
was to have been indued with the rather startling appella- 
tion of 

AN APOLOGY FOR HEATHENISM ; 

especially as contrasted with practical atheism, which, truth 
to tell, is the contradictory sort of religion most universally 
professed among the moderns : working out the idea, that 



AN APOLOGY. 99 



any-how it is better to have many objects of veneration than 
none, and that although idol-worship is a dreadful sin, still 
it is not so utterly hopeless as actual ungodliness. That, 
among the heathens, temporal judgment ever vindicated the 
true Divinity; whereas the consummation of the more mod- 
ern unworshiping world will be an eternal one: so, by the 
difference in punishments comparing that of their criminali- 
ties. Showing also that, however corrupted afterwards by 
impure rites and fatuous iniquities, heathenism was, in its 
most ancient form, little more than the hieroglyphical dress 
of truth: this exemplified by Moses and the brazen serpent, 
by interpretations of Grecian mythology, shown, after the 
manner of perhaps too ingenious Lord Bacon, to be consistent 
with philosophy and religion ; by the way in which Egyptian 
priests satisfied so good and shrewd, though credulous, a mind 
as that of Herodotus; by Hesiod's Theogony; by the prac- 
tical testimony of the whole educated world in earliest times 
to the deep meaning involved in idolatrous rites; by the 
mysteries of Eleusis in particular; by the characters of all 
most enlightened heathens, as Cicero, Socrates, and Plato, 
(half-convinced of the Godhead's unity, and still afraid to 
disavow His plurality,) contrasted with those of the school 
of Pyrrho, and Lucretius, and the later Epicureans. The 
possibility of early allusions to the Trinity, as " Let us make 
man," etc., having led to the idea of more than one God ; and 
if so, in some sort, its veniality. 

All the above might be applied with some force, and if so 
with no little value, to modern false semblances of religion 
and non-religion; to Roman Catholicism, w r ith its images, its 
services in an unknown tongue, its symbols, its adoption of 
heathen festivals, its actual placing of many Gods in the 
throne of One ; to Mammonism, as practically a religion as 



100 BIBLICAL SIMILES; 1 , 



if the golden calf of Babylon were standard at Cornhill ; to 
Voluptatism, — if I may fabricate a name for pleasure-hunters, 
following still, with Corybantic fury, the orgic revels of 
Osiris or Astarte: in brief, to all the shades of human heresy, 
on this side or on that of the golden mean, the worship of 
one true God, as revealed to us in His three mysterious cha- 
racters. 

But, query? has not all this, and the very title, for any- 
thing I know, been done already by another, by a wiser, — 
and, if so, by whom ? — Speak, some friend : it is the misfor- 
tune of mere thinkers (and this present amygdaloid mass, 
this breccia book exemplifies it well) to stumble frequently 
upon fancies too good not to have been long ago appropriated 
by others like-minded. A read, or heard, hint may be the 
unerring clue, and we vainly imagine some old Labyrinth to 
be our new discovery : education renders up the master-key, 
and we come to regard ancient treasuries as wealth of our 
own amassing, from which we deem it our right to filch as 
recklessly as he from the mint of Croesus, who so filled his 
pockets, ay, his mouth, that we read he ebebusto. Who, in 
this age of literature, can be fully condemned, or heartily 
acquitted of Plagiarism ? An age — and none so little in ad- 
vance or in arrear of it as I — of easy writing and discursive 
reading, of ideas unpatented, and books that have outlived 
copyright. — But this has detained us long enough; for the 
present my brain is quit of its heathenish exculpations : let 
us pass on ; many regiments are yet to be reviewed ; their 
uniforms [Hibernice] are various, but their flag is one. 

A last serious subject — (they grow tedious) — is a fair field 
for ingenious explanation, and Oriental poetry, 

THE SIMILES OF SCRIPTURE: 



AN INVESTIGATION. 101 

(of course " similes" is an English word : the author of a 
recent Essay on Magna Charta has been learned enough to 
write it " similae," for which original piece of Latinity let 
him be congratulated; I safely follow Johnson, who would 
have roared like a lion at " similia ;" and, though Shakspeare 
does write it " similies," it may stoutly be contended that 
this is of mixed metal, and that Matthew Prior's " similes" 
is the purer sample : all the above being a praiseworthy 
parenthesis.) 

The similes of Scripture, then, were to have been demon- 
strated apt and happy : for there is indeed both majesty, and 
loveliness, and propriety, and strict resemblance in them. 
" As a rolling thing before the whirlwind," — " as when 
a standard-bearer fainteth" — " as the rushing of mighty 
waters," — " as gleaning grapes when the vintage is done," 
— " as a dream," — u as the morning dew," — a as" — but the 
whole book is a garden of similitudes, they are " like the 
sand upon the sea-shore for multitude." It is, however, too 
true that oftentimes the baldness of translation deprives 
poetry, Eastern especially, of its fervor, its glow, its gush, 
and blush of beauty : to quote Aristotle's example, it too 
frequently converts the rosy-fingered Morn into the red-fisted ; 
and so the poetry of dawning-day, with its dew-dropped 
flowers, its healthy refreshment, its u rosy fingers" drawing 
aside the star-spangled curtain of night, falls at once into the 
low notion of a foggy morning, and is suggestive only of red- 
fisted Abigails struggling continuously with the deposits of a 
London atmosphere. In like manner, (for all this has not 
been an episode beside the purpose,) many a roughly rendered 
similitude of Scripture might be advantageously vindicated ; 
local diversities and Orientalisms might be explained in such 
a treatise : for example, in the Canticles, the " beloved 



102 BIBLICAL SIMILES, 

among the sons," is compared with " an apple-tree among 
the trees of the wood :" now, amongst us, an apple-tree is 
stunted and unsightly, and always degenerates in a wood; 
whereas the Eastern apple-tree, probably one of the citron 
class, (to be more correct,) maybe a magnificent monarch of 
the forest. " Camphire," to a Western mind, is not suggest- 
ive of the sweetest perfume, and perhaps the word may be 
amended into the marginal " cypress," or cedar, or some 
other : as " a bottle in the smoke," loses its propriety for an 
image, until shown to be a wineskin. " Who is this that 
cometh out of the wilderness, like pillars of smoke?"' — pro- 
bably intending the swiftly-rushing columns of sand flying on 
the wings of the whirlwind. " Thine eyes are like the fish- 
pools in Heshbon," might well be softened into fountains, — 
tearful, calm, resplendent, and rejoicing ; and in showing the 
poetic fitness of comparing the bride to a landscape it might 
clearly be set out how emblematic of Jewish millennial pros- 
perity, and of Christian universality, that bride was : while 
comparisons of a like un-European imagery might be taken 
from other Eastern poets, who will not scruple to compare 
that rare beauty, a straight Grecian nose, with a tower, and 
admire above all things the Cleopatra-colored hair which 
they call purple, and we auburn. Very much might be done 
in this vein of literature, but it must be by a man at once an 
Oriental scholar and a natural poet : the idioms of ancient 
and modern times should be more considered, and something 
of apologetic explanation offered to an English ear for phrases 
such as " the mountains skipping like rams," " the horse 
swallowing the ground with fierceness," and represented as 
being " afraid as a grasshopper." A thousand like instances 
could be displayed with little searching ; let the above be 
taken as they are meant, for good, and as of zeal for showing 



HOME. 103 

the best of books to the best advantage : but it will appear 
that this essay trenches on the former one so slenderly hinted 
at, as " the wisdom of Revision," and therefore has been 
stated too much at length already. Let it then rest on the 
shelf till a better season. For this time, good reader, I, fol- 
lowing up the object of self-relieving, thank you for your 
patience, and will turn to other themes of a more sublunary 
aspect. 



One of the most natural and indigenous productions of a 
true Author's mind, is, by common consent, an Epic poem: 
verily, a w T earisome, unnecessary, unfashionable bit of writ- 
ing. Nevertheless, let my candor humbly acknowledge, 
that, for the larger cantle of two mortal days, I was brooding 
over and diligently brewing up a right happy, capital, and 
noble-minded thesis, no other than 

HOME. 

Alas, for the epidemy to which, few can doubt, ideas are 
subject! Alas, for the conflict of prolific geniuses, wherew T ith 
the world's quiet is disturbed ! Not impossibly, this very 
book now in progress of inditing will come to be classed as 
a " Patch-work," an u Olla Podrida," a " Book without a 
name," or some other such like rechauffee publication; 
whereas I protest its idea to be exclusively mine own, and 
conceived long before its seeming congeners saw the light in 
definite advertisements, — at least to my beholding. And 
similarly w r ent it with my poor Epic : scarcely had a gene- 
ral plan suggested itself to my musings, and divers par- 
ticular morsels thereof assumed " their unpremeditative 



104 HOME; 

lay;" scarcely had I jotted down a staid synopsis, and a 
goodly array of metrical specimens; when some intrusive 
newspaper displayed to me in black and white a good-natured 
notice of somebody else's "Home, an Epic." So, as in the 
case of Nero, and haply of other subjects, had it come to 
pass, that my high-mettled racer had made another false 
start ; that my just-discovered island, so gladly to have been 
self-appropriated, w 7 as found to have, sticking on one corner 
of it, the flag of another king ; that the havoc of my brain, 
subsiding calmly into the pendulum regularities of metre, 
was much ado about nothing ; and all those pretty fancies 
were the catalogued property of another. Such a subject, 
too! intrinsically worthy of a niche in the temple of Fame 
beside Hope, Memory, and Imagination, if only one could 
manage it well enough to be named in the same breath with 
Campbell, Rogers, and Akenside. Well, — it was a mental 
mortification ; for I am full of moral landmarks, and would 
not (poetically speaking) for a w T orld move rooted termini 
into other people's grounds. Whether the field has been 
well or ill pre-occupied I wot not, having neither seen the 
poem nor heard its maker's name : therefore shall my charity 
hope well of it, and mourn over the unmerited oblivion 
which generally greets modern poetry, yea upon its very 
natal day. Nevertheless, as an upright man will never wish 
barefacedly to steal from others, so does he determine at all 
times to claim independently his own: to be robbed and not 
resent it (I speak foolishly) is the next mean thing after pil- 
fering itself; and rash will be thy daring, literary larcener, 
(can such things be?) if thou art found unpermissively ap- 
propriating even such sorry spoil as these poor seedlings of 
still possible volumes. 

Prose and verse are allowed to have some disguising differ- 



AN EPIC. 105 

ences, at least in termination; and as we must not — so hints 
the public taste — spoil honest prose, bad as it may be, with 
too much intermixture of worse verse, it will be prudent in 
me to be sparing of my specimens. Yet, who will endure so 
staccato a page of jerking sentences as a confirmed synopsis? 
— u Well, anything rather than poetry," says the world ; so, 
for better or worse, I will jot down prosaically a few of my 
all but impromptu imaginings on Home. 

After some general propositions, it would be proper to 
indulge the orthodoxy of invocation; not to Muses, how- 
ever, but to the subject itself; for now-a-days, in lieu of 
definite deities, our worship has regard to theories, doctrines, 
and other abstract idolisms : and thereafter should follow at 
length an historical retrospect of domestic life, from the 
savage to the transition states of hunters and warriors ; Nim- 
rods and New Zealanders, Actaeons and Avanese, Attilas, 
Rodericks, and all in the Ercles 5 vein or that of mad Cam- 
byses, Hindoos and Fuegians, Greece, Egypt, Etruria, and 
Troy, in those old days when funds and taxes were not 
invented, but people had to fight for their dinner and be their 
own police: so in a due course of circumconsideration to 
more modern conditions, from ourselves as central civiliza- 
tion, to Cochin China, and extreme Mexico, to Archangel 
and Polynesia. 

Divers national peculiarities of the physique of homes; as, 
Tartar's tents, Esquimaux snow-pits, Caffre kraals, Steppe 
huts, South-sea palm-thatch, tree-villages, caves, log-cabins, 
and so forth. Then, a wide view of the homes of higher 
society, first Continental, afterwards British ; through all the 
different phases of comfort to be found in heath-hovels, cot- 
tages ornees, villas, parsonage-houses, squirealties, seats, 
tow T n mansions, and royal palaces. Thus, with a contrastive 



106 HOME; 

peep or two about the feverish neighborhood of a factory, up 
this musty alley, and down that winding lane, we should 
have considered briefly all the external accidents of home. 
The miserable condition of the homeless, whether rich or 
poor ; an oak with its tap-root broken, a house on wheels, a 
boat without a compass, and all that sort of thing : together 
with due declamation about soldiers spending twenty years 
in India, shipwrecked Robinson Crusoes far from native 
Hull, cadets going out hopelessly for ever, emigrants, con- 
victs, missionaries, and all other absentees, voluntary or in- 
voluntary. Tirades upon abject poverty, wanton affluence, 
poor laws, mendicancy, and Ireland ; not omitting some 
thrilling cases of barbaric destitution. 

Now come we lawfully to descant upon matters more men- 
tal and sentimental, — the metaphysique of the subject,— the 
pleasures and the pains of Home. As thus, most cursorily: 
the nursery, with its dear innocent joys; the schoolboy, holi- 
day feelings, and scholastic cruelties ; the desk-abhorring 
clerk; the over-worked milliner; the starving family of fac- 
tory children, and of agricultural laborers and of workers in 
coal-mines and iron furnaces, with earnest exhortation to the 
rich to pour their horns of plenty on the poor. England, 
once a safer and a happier land, under the law of charity : now 
fast verging into a despotic centralized system, kept together 
by bayonets and constables' staves. Home a refuge for all ; 
for queens and princes from their cumbrous state, as well as 
for clowns from their hedging and ditching. The home of 
love, and its thousand blessings, founded on mutual confi- 
dence, religion, open-heartedness, communion of interest, 
absence of selfishness, and so on: the honored father, due 
subordination, and results ; the loving w T ife, obedient children, 
and cheerful servants. Absolute, though most kind, mon- 



AN EPIC. 107 



archy the best government for a home; with digressions 
about Austria and China, and such laudable paternal rule ; 
and contra, bitter castigation of republican misrule, its evils, 
and their results, for which see Old Athens and New York, 
and certain spots half-way between them. 

The pains of home: most various indeed, caused by all 
sorts of opposite harms, — too much constraint or too little, 
open bad example or impossible good example, omissions 
and commissions, duty relaxed by indulgence, and duty 
tightened into tyranny ; but mainly and generally attributable 
to the non-assertion or other abuse of parental authority. 
The spoiled child, and his progress of indulgence, unchecked 
passions, dissipation, crime, and ruin. Interested interlopers, 
as former friends, relatives, flatterers, and busy parasites, 
undermining that bond of confidence without which Home 
falls to pieces ; the gloomy spirit of reserve, discouraging 
everything like generous open-heartedness; menial influences 
lowering their subject to their own base level ; discords reli- 
gious, political, and social; the harmful consequence of over- 
expenditure to ape the hobbies or grandeur of the wealthier; 
foolish education beyond one's sphere, as the baker's daugh- 
ter taking lessons in Italian, and opera-stricken butcher-boys 
strumming the guitar; immoral tendencies, gambling, drink- 
ing, and other dissipations ; and the aggregate of discomforts, 
of every sort and kind ; with cures for all these evils ; and 
to end finally by a grand climax of supplication, invocation, 
imprecation, resignation, and beatification, in the regular 
aerash of a stout-expiring overture. 

It's all very well, objects reader, and very easy to consider 
this done ; but the difficulty is — Not so much to do it, answers 
writer, as to escape the bother of prolixity by proving how 
much has been done, and how speedily all might even be 



106 HOME; 

completed, had poor poesy in these ticketing times only a 
fair field and no disfavor ; for there is at hand good grist, 
ready ground, baked and caked, and waiting for its eaters. 
But in this age of prose-devouring and verse-despising, hardy 
indeed should I be, if I adventured to bore the poor much- 
abused uncomplaining public with hundreds of lines out of 
a dormant epic ; the very phrase is a lullaby ; it's as catching 
as a yawn ; well will it be for me if my threadbare domino 
conceals me, for whose better fame could brook the scandal 
of having fathered or fostered so slumbering an embryo ? — 
Let then a few shreds and patches suffice, — a brick or two 
for the house : and verily I know they will, be they never so 
scanty ; for what man of education does not now entertain a 
just abhorrence of the Muses, the nine antiquated maiden 
aunts destined for ever to be pensioned on that money-making 
nice young man, Mammon's great heir-at-law, Prose Prose, 
Esq. ? 

With humblest fear, then, and infinite apology, behold, in 
all sober seriousness, what the labor of such a file as I am 
might betimes work into a respectable commencement: I don't 
pretend it is one ; but valeat quantum, take it as it stands, 
unweeded, unpruned, uncared-for, unaltered. 

Home, happy word, dear England's ancient boast, 
Thou strongest castle on her sea-girt coast, 
Thou full fair name for comfort, love, and rest, 
Haven of refuge found and peace possest, 
Oasis in the desert, star of light 
Spangling the dreary dark of this world's night, 
All-hallowed spot of angel-trodden ground 
Where Jacob's ladder plants its lowest round, 
Imperial realm amid the slavish world, 
Where Freedom's banner ever floats unfurl'd, 



AN EPIC. 109 



Fair island of the blest, earth's richest wealth, 
Her plague-struck body's little all of health, 
Home, gentle name, I woo thee to ray song, 
To thee ray praise, to thee my prayers belong ; 
Inspire me with thy beauty, bid me teem 
With gracious musings worthy of my theme : 
Spirit of Love, the soul of Home thou art, 
Fan with divinest thoughts ray kindling heart; 
Spirit of Power, in pray'rs thine aid I ask, 
Uphold me, bless me to my holy task ; 
Spirit of Truth, guide thou my wayward wing: 
Love, Power, and Truth, be with me while I sing. 

Via: my consolation is that somewhere may be read, in 
hot-pressed print, too, many worse poeticals than these, 
which, however, nine readers out of ten will have had the 
worldly wisdom to skip; and the tenth is soon satiated: yet 
a tithe is something, at least so think the modern Levites; so 
then, on second thoughts, a victim who is so good a listener 
must not be let off quite so cheaply. However, to vary a 
little this melancholy rausing, and to gild the compulsory pill, 
Reserve shall be served up sonnet-wise. (P.S. I love the 
sonnet, maligned as it is both by ill-attempting friend and 
semi-sneering foe: of course, in our epic, Reserve ambles 
not about in this uncertain rhyme, but duly stalks abroad in 
the uniform dress; iambically still, though extricated from 
those involutions, time out of mind the requisite of sonnets.) 
Stand forth to be chastised, unpopular 

RESERVE : 

Thou chilling, freezing fiend, Love's mortal bane, 
Lethargic poison of the Moral Sense, 



110 HOME 

Killing those high-soul'd children of the brain, 
Warm Enterprise, and noble Confidence, 
Fly from the threshold, traitor, — get thee hence ! 

Without thee, we are open, cheerful, kind, 

Mistrusting none, but self, injurious self, 
Of and to others wishing only good ; 

With thee, suspicions crowd the gloomy mind, 
Suggesting all the world a viperous brood 

That acts a base bad part in hope of pelf: 

Virtue stands shamed, Truth mute misunderstood, 

Honor unhonor'd, Courage lacking nerve, 

Beneath thy dull domestic curse, Reserve. 

Without professing much tendency to the uxorious, all 
may blamelessly confess that they see exceeding beauty in a 
good wife ; and we need never apologize for the unexpected 
company of ladies: at off-hand then let this one sit for her 
portrait. Enduring listener, will the following serve our 
purpose in striving worthily to apostrophize 

THE WIFE? 

Behold, how fair of eye, and mild of mien, 
Walks forth of marriage yonder gentle queen : 
What chaste sobriety whene'er she speaks, 
What glad content sits smiling on her cheeks, 
What plans of goodness in that bosom glow, 
What prudent care is throned upon her brow, 
What tender truth in all she does or says, 
What pleasantness and peace in all her ways ! 
For ever blooming on that cheerful face 
Home's best affections grow divine in grace; 



AN EPIC. 

Her eyes are ray'd with love, serene and bright ; 
Charity wreathes her lips with smiles of light ; 
Her kindly voice hath music in its notes ; 
And HeavVs own atmosphere around her floats! 

Thus, wife-like, for better or w T orse, is the above portrait 
charmant consigned to the dingy digits of an undistinguishing 
printer's-devil ; so doth Caesar's dust come to stop a bung- 
hole. One morsel more, about children, blessed children, 
and for this bout I shall have tilted sufficiently in the Muses' 
court; or, if it must be so said, unhandsome critic, stilted to 
satiety in false heroics : stay, — not false ; judge me, my heart. 
Suppose then an imaginary parent thus to speak about his 

INFANT DAUGHTERS : 

Oh ye, my beauteous nest of snow-white doves, 

What wealth could price for me your guileless loves ? 

My earthly cherubim, my precious pearls, 

My pretty flock of loving little girls, 

My stores of happiness with least alloy, 

My treasuries of hope and trembling joy! 

Yon toothless darling, nestled soft and warm 

On a young yearning mother's cradling arm ; 

The soft angelic smiles of natural grace 

Tinting with love that other little face ; 

And the sweet budding of this sinless mind 

In winning ways, that round my heart-strings wind, 

Dear winning ways, — dear nameless winning ways, 

That send me joyous to my God in praise, — 

Enough ! not heartlessly, but to shame the heartlessness 
of your ennui, let me veil those holiest affections: yes, even 



112 GRECIAN SAYINGS 



at the risk of leaving nominatives widowed of their faithful 
verbs, will I, until required, epicize no more. Let these 
mauled bits be intimations of w T hat a little care might have 
made a little better. Gladly will I keep all the remainder 
in a state quiescent, even to doubling Horace's wholesome 
prescription of nine years: for it is impossible but that your 
fervent poet, in the heat of inspiration, ( — credit me, lack- 
wits, there is such a thing, — ) should blurt out many an un- 
palateable bit of advice, rebuke, or virtuous indignation 
against homes in general, for the which sundry conscience- 
stricken particulars might uncharitably arraign him. But 
divers other notions are crowding into the retina of my 
mind's-eye ; I must leave my epic as you see it, and bid 
farewell, a long farewell, to Home. Still shall my egotism 
have to appear for many weary pages a most impartial and 
universal friend to the world of bibliopolists ; I cater multifari- 
ously for all varieties of the literary profession: booksellers at 
least must own me as their friend, though the lucky purse of 
Fortunatus saves me from being impaled upon the point of 
poor Goldsmith's epigram, and I leave to [ — ] the questiona- 
ble praise of being their hack. For Bentley and Hatchard, 
alike with Rivington and Frazer, for Colburn and Nisbet, as 
well as Knight, Tilt, Tyas, Moxon, and Murray, I seem to be 
gratuitously pouring out in equal measure my versatile medita- 
tions : at this sign all customers may be suited ; only, shop- 
lifters will be visited with the utmost rigor of that obnoxious 
monosyllable. — Well, poor Epic, good night to you, and my 
benison on those who love you. 



To any one, much in the habit of thoughtful reverie, how 
very unsatisfactory those notions look in writing. He can't 



A SERIES. 113 

half unravel the chaotic cobwebs of his mind ; as he plods 
along penning it, a thousand fancies flit about him too intan- 
gibly for fixed words, and his everteeming hot imagination 
cannot away with the slow process of concreted composition. 
For me, I must write impromptu, or not at all ; none of your 
conventional impromptus, toils of half-a-day, as little instan- 
taneous as sundry patent lights; no working-up of laborious 
epigrams, sedulously sharpened antitheses, or scintillative 
trifles diligently filed and polished ; but the positive im- 
promptu of longing to be an adept at shorthand-w T riting, by 
way of catching as they fly those swift-winged thoughts ; not 
quick enough by half; most of those bright colors unfixed ; 
most of those fair semi-notions unrecorded. To say nothing 
of reasons of time, there being other things to do, and reasons 
of space, there being other things to write. And thus, good 
friend, affectionately believe the best of these crude intima- 
tions of things intellectual, which the husbandry of good 
diligence, and the golden shower of Danae's enamored, and 
the smiles of the Sun of encouragement might heretofore 
have ripened into Authorship; nay, more, perhaps may still: 
believe, generously, that if I could coil off quietly, like un- 
wrapped cocoons, all these epics, tragics, theologies, pathe- 
tics, analytics, and didactics, they would show in fairer forms, 
and better-defined proportions: believe, also, truly, that I 
could if I would, and that I would, if the game were worth 
its candle. 

But, sooth to say, the over-gorged public may well regard 
that small-tomed author with most favorable eye, who con- 
denses himself within the narrowest limits ; a diable boiteux, 
not the huge spirit of the Hartz ; concentrated meat-lozenges, 
not soup maigre ; pocket-pistols of literature, not lumbering 
parks of its artillery. Verily, there is a mightier mass of 
8 



114 GRECIAN SAYINGS; 

typography than of readers; and the reading world, from 
very brevity of life, must rush, at a Bedouin pace, over the 
illimitable plains of newspaper publication, while the pyra- 
mids of dusty folio are left to stand in solitary proud neglect. 
The cursory railroad spirit is abroad : we abhor that old pain- 
ful ploughing through axle-deep ruts : the friend who will 
skate with us is welcomer than he who holds us freezing by 
the button ; and the teacher, who suggestively bounds in his 
balloon on the tops of a chain of arguments, is more popular 
in lecturing than he of the old school, who must duteously 
and laboriously struggle up and down those airy promon- 
tories. 

I love an avenue, though, like Lord Ashburton's magni- 
ficent mile of yew-trees, it may lead to nothing ; and there- 
fore have not expunged this unnecessary preface : rather, 
will I bluntly come upon a next subject, another work in my 
unseen circulating library, 

THE SEVEN SAYINGS 

OF GRECIAN WISDOM. 

ILLUSTRATED IN SEVEN TALES. 

Cordially may this theme be commended to the more illu- 
minating booksellers; well would it be greeted by the pic- 
ture-loving public. It might come out from time to time as 
a periodical, in a classical wrapper; might be decorated with 
the sages' physiognomies, copied from antique gems, with 
the fancied passage in each one's life that provoked the say- 
ing, and with specific illustrations of the exemplifying story. 
There should be a brilliant preface, introducing the seven 
sages to each other and the reader, after the ensample of 



A SERIES. 115 

Plutarch, and exhausting all the antiquarianism, all the me- 
moirism, and all the varia-lectionism of the subject. The 
different tales should be of different countries and ages of 
the world, to ensure variety, and give an easier exit to ennui. 
As thus: Solon's " Know thyself" might be fitted to an 
Eastern favorite raised suddenly to power, or a poor and 
honest Glasgow weaver all upon a day served as heir to a 
Scotch barony, when he forthwith falls into fashionable vices. 
Chilo's "Note the end of life" might concern the merriment 
of the drunkard's career, and its end — delirium tremens, or 
spontaneous combustion : better, perhaps, as less vulgarian, 
the grandeur and assassination of some Milanese ducal tyrant. 
The u Watch your opportunity" of Pittacus could be shown 
in the fortunes of some Whittington of trade, some Washing- 
ton of peace, or some Napoleon of war. Bias's uncharitable 
bias, believing' the worst of the world, might seem to some 
a truism, to others a falsehood, according as their fellows 
have served them well or ill ; but a brief history of some 
hypocrite's life, some misanthrope's experience, or some 
Arabian Stylobatist's resolve to be perched above this black 
earth on a column like a stork, might help to prove that " the 
majority are wicked." As for Periander's aphorism, that 
" to industry all things are possible," pyramid-building old 
Egypt, or the Druids of Stonehenge, or Scottish proverbial 
perseverance in Australian sheep-rearing, and Canadian tim- 
ber clearing, will carry the point by acclamation. Cleobulus, 
praising u moderation in all things," would glorify a moral 
warning of universal application, as to pleasures, riches, and 
rank ; or especially perhaps as preferring true temperance 
before its' modern teetotal false pretences; or lauding some 
Richard Cromwell's choice of a quiet country life, before the 
turbulent honors of a proffered Protectorate ; while Thales, 



116 GRECIAN SAYINGS. 

with his all but old English proverb of " more haste, less 
speed," would apply admirably to Sulton Mahmoud's ruin- 
ous reforms ; or to the actual injury gulled Britain has done 
to the condition of negroes in general by a vastly too pre- 
cipitate abolition of the slave trade: a vile evil, indeed, but 
a cancer of too long creeping to be cured in a day ; a rot- 
tenness too deeply seated in the framework of the world to 
be extirpated by such caustic surgery as fire and sword ; or to 
be quacked into health by patent gold-salve. 

Seven such tales, shrewdly setting out their several aims, 
and illustrative of good moral maxims which wise heathens 
lived by, would (I trow and trust) be somewhat better, more 
original, ay and more entertaining, too, than the common 
run of magazine adventures. It may not here be fair to par- 
ticularize further than in the way of avowing my unmitigated 
contempt for the exploits of highwaymen, swindlers, men 
about town, and ladies of the pave. I protest against gild- 
ing crimes, and palliating follies. Serve the public tables 
with better food, good Pandarus. Those commentators on 
the Newgate calendar, those bringers-into-fashion of the 
mysteries of vice, must not be quite acquitted of the evils 
they have caused: brilliancy of dialogue, and graphic power 
of delineation, are only weapons in a madman's hand, if the 
moral be corrupting and profane. To cheerful, hearty, care- 
dispelling humor, to such merry faces as Pickwick and Co. 
— inimitable Pickwick, — hail, all hail! but triumphs of bur- 
glary, and escapes of murderers, aroint ye! 

Why then should I throw this cargo overboard? — Friend, 
my ship is too full ; if I could only do one thing at a time, 
and could finish it within the limits of its originating fit, these 
things all might be less abortive. But I doubt if my glori- 



HEPTALOGIA. 117 



fication of Greek aphorisms ever reaches any higher apo- 
theosis than the airy castles sketchily built above. 



Similar in idea with these last tales, but essentially more 
sacred as to character, would be an illustrative elucidation of 
the seven last sayings of our Blessed Lord, w T hen dying, in 
the crucifixion. The Romish Church in some of her impos- 
ing ceremonies has caused the sayings to be exhibited on 
seven banners which are occasionally carried before the holy 
cross: from this I probably derived the idea of detaching 
these sentences from the framework of their contexts, and 
regarding them in some sort as aphorisms. For a name, not 
to be tautologous, should be proposed a Graeco-Anglicism, 

THE HEPTALOGIA ; 

OUR SAVIOUR'S SEVEN LAST SAYINGS. 

The addition of u hagia" might be rather too Attic for 
English ears ; and I know not whether " the Sacred Hepta- 
logia" would not also be too mystical. This series of tales 
is capable of like illustration with the last, except in the 
matter of portraits, unless indeed some eminent fathers of the 
church, or some authenticated enamels, gems, or coins, (if 
any,) displaying our Lord's likeness, served the purpose ; 
and of course the character of the stories should not be much 
in dissonance with the sacredness of the text. The first 
might well enforce forgiveness of enemies, especially if their 
hatred springs from misapprehension. " Father, forgive 
them ; for they know not what they do:" many a true story 
of religious persecution, as of Inquisitorial torture, exacted 



118 HEPTALOGIA 

by sincere bigotry, and endured by equally sincere convic- 
tion, would illustrate the prayer, and the scene might be laid 
among Waldensian saints and the friars of Madrid. The 
second tale might enlarge upon a promised Paradise, the 
assurance of pardon, and the efficacy of repentance: the 
certainty of hope and life being co-extensive, so that it might 
still be said of the seeming worst, the brigand or blasphemer, 
u To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise;" a story to 
check presumption, while it encourages the humility of peni- 
tent hope ; the details of a prodigal's career and his return, 
say a falsely philosophizing German student, or the excesses 
of some not ungenerous outburst of youthful wantonness; 
haply, a fair and passionate Neapolitan. The third might 
w T ell regard filial piety; " Behold thy son, — behold thy 
mother:" illustrated perhaps by a slave scene in Morocco, 
or the last adieus between a Maccabsean mother and her noble 
children rushing on duteous death ; or the dangers of a son, 
during the reign of terror, protecting his proscribed parents ; 
or allusive to the case of many razed and fired homes in the 
Irish rebellion. The fourth, necessarily a tale of overwhelm- 
ing calamity ultimately triumphant, " My God, my God, why 
hast thou forsaken me ?" — the confidence of my God still, 
even in His recognized judgments trusted in as merciful : the 
history of many an unrecorded Job ; a parent bereaved of 
fair dear children ; an aged merchant beggared by the roguery 
of others, and his very name blamelessly dishonored ; the 
extremity of a martyr's sufferings ; or some hunted soul's 
temptation. The fifth, " I thirst;" which might be com- 
mented on, either morally only, as referring to a thirst after 
religion, virtue, and knowledge, — or physically also, in some 
story of well-endured miseries at sea on a wrecking raft ; or 
of Christian resignation even to the horrible death of drought 



A COLLECTION. 119 

among the torrid sands of Africa: or some noble act, like 
that of Sir Philip Sydney on the battle-field, or David's liba- 
tion of that desired draught from the well of Bethlehem. I 
need not remark that all these sayings might primarily be 
applied to their Good Utterer, if it seemed more advisable to 
shape the publication into seven sermons : but this, it will at 
once be perceived, is not the present object ; the word " ser- 
mons" has to most men a repulsive sound, and a tale, similar 
in disguised motive, may win, where an orderly discourse 
might unhappily repel : a teacher's best influences are the 
indirect; like the conquering troops at Culloden, his charge 
will be oblique ; his weapon will strike the unguarded flank, 
and not the opposing target. The sixth, u It is finished ;" 
perhaps, not only as a fact on the true, the necessary value 
of the Christian scheme of redemption being so completed, 
— but, more generally, to display the evils and dangers of 
leaving mental, spiritual, or even worldly good designs un- 
finished : a tale of natural procrastination conquered, diffi- 
culties overcome, prejudices broken down, and gigantic good 
effected : a Russian Peter, a literary Johnson, a missionary 
Neff, a Wesley, or a Henry Martyn. The seventh, descant- 
ing upon noble patience, and agonies vanquished by faith, 
the death and glorious expectance of a martyr, the end of 
one of Fox's heroes ; " Father, into Thy hands I commend 
my spirit." Of necessity in these Christian tales there would 
be more of sameness than in those heathen ; because it would 
be improper and impolitic, with such theses, to enter much 
into the lower human passions and the common events of life. 
But my intentions of further proceeding in this matter have, 
as at present, very sensibly subsided ; for many wise and 
many good might reasonably object to making those holy last 
dying words mere pegs to hang moral tales upon. The idea 



120 ALFRED 



might please one little sect, and anger half the world : I care 
not to behold it accomplished, and question my own capa- 
bilities ; only, as it has been an authorial project heretofore 
conceived by me, suffer it to boast this brief existence. 



It is scandalously reported of some folks that they are not 
musical, a calumny that has been whispered of myself ; and, 
though against my own convictions, (who will confess he 
" has not music in his soul ?") I partly acquiesce ; that is to 
say, — for, of such a charge self-defence claims to explain a 
little, — although I am charmed with all manner of music, 
still for choice I prefer a German chorus to an Italian solo, 
and an English glee to a French jig. Accordingly the ope- 
ratic world have every reason to despise my taste; especially 
if I add that Welsh songs, and Scotch and Irish national 
melodies — [where are our English gone?] — rejoice my heart 
beyond Mozart and Rossini. And now this next little notion 
is scarcely of substance sufficient to assume the garb of author- 
ship ; it is little more than a passing whim, but I choose for 
the very notion's sake to make it better known. Except in 
a very few instances, — as Haydn's Seasons, e. g. — Oratorios, 
from some conventional idea of Lent, we may suppose, seem 
obligated to concern matters sacred. Of course, everybody 
is aware of the prayerful meaning of the name ; but we know 
also that a Madrigal has long ago put off its monkish robe of 
a hymn to the Virgin, and worn the more laic habit of a love- 
song. Now, it is a fact, that very many good men, who 
delight in Handel's melody, and of course cannot object to 
psalms and anthems, entertain conscientious objections to 
hearing the Bible set to music in a concert-room ; and sure 
may we all be, that, unless the whole thing be regarded as 



AN ORATORIO. 121 

a religious service, (in a mixed gay company who think of 
sound more than sense, not very easy,) the warbling of sacred 
phrases, and variations on the summoning trumpet, and imi- 
tated angelic praise, and the unfelt expressions of musical 
repentance, and unfearing despondency of guilt in recitative, 
are anything but congenial to a mind properly attuned. I 
hope I am neither prudish, nor squeamish, nor splenetic, but 
speak only what many feel, and few care to express. Now, 
the cure in future for all this would be very simple : why not 
have some lay oratorios? Protestants have appropriated the 
madrigal, and listen, delighted with its melody, without the 
needless offence of seeming to countenance idolatry ; why 
should they not have solemn music, new or ancient as may 
be adapted, administering to their patriotism, or their tragic 
interests, or historic recollections, without grating against 
their feelings of religious veneration? — To be specific, let 
me suggest a-subject, and show r , for the benefit of any Pindar 
of this day, its musical capabilities: we are, or ought to be 
as Englishmen, all stirred at the name of 

ALFRED ; 

and he would minister as well to the harmonies of an oratorio 
as Abel, or Jephtha, Moses, or St. Paul, nay, as the Messiah, 
or the last dread Judgment. Remember, our Alfred was a 
proficient himself, and spied the Danish forces in the cha- 
racter of a harper ; what scope were here for gentle airs, and 
stirring Saxon songs! He harangues his patriot band, and a 
manly Phillips would personify with admirable taste the truly 
royal bard : he leaves Athel-switha his wife, and a fair flock 
of children, in sanctuary, while he rushes to the battle-field; 
the churchmen might receive their queenly charge with 



122 ALFRED 

music : the Danes riot in their unguarded camp with drink- 
ing-snatches, and old-country-staves: a storm might occur, 
with elemental crash : the succeeding silence of nature, and 
distant coming on of the patriot troops at midnight ; their 
war-songs and marches nearer and nearer ; the invaders 
surprised in their camp and in their cups ; the hurlyburly of 
the fight, — a hailstone chorus of arrows, a clash of thousand 
swords, trumpets, drums, and clattering horse-hoofs ; a silent 
interval, to introduce a single combat between Alfred and 
Hubba the Dane, with Homeric challenges, tenor and bass ; 
the routed foe, in clamorous and discordant staccato ; the con- 
querors pressing on in steady overwhelming concord ; how 
are the mighty fallen, — and praise to the God of battles! 

Most briefly, then, thus: there is religion enough to keep 
it solemn, without being so experimental as to intrude upon 
personal prejudice. The notion is too slight, and too slen- 
derly worked out, even for admission here, if I were not still, 
my shrewd and mindful reader, sedulously endeavoring to 
get rid of all my brain-oppressing fancies: and this, happen- 
ing to come uppermost as I write, finds itself caught, to my 
comfort. It is commended, if worth anything, to the musical 
proficient : for I might as well think of adding a note to the 
gamut as of trying to compose an oratorio. 



The authorial mind is infinitely versatile : books and book- 
making are indeed its special privilege, forte, and distinguish- 
ing peculiarity ; but still its thoughts and regards are ever 
cast towards originality of idea, though unwritten and un- 
printed, in all the multitudinous departments of science and of 
art. Thus, mechanical invention, chemical discovery, music 
as above, painting as elsewhere, sculpture as below, give it 



A TRANSLATION. 123 

exercise continually. The authorial mind never is at rest, 
but always to be seen mounted and careering on one hobby- 
horse or other out of its untiring stud. If the coin of some 
rude Parthian, or the fragments of some old Ephesian frieze, 
serve not as a scope for its present ingenuities, it will break 
out in a new method of grafting raspberries on a rosebush, 
in the comfortable cut of a pilot-coat, or the safest machinery 
for a steamer. Ne sutor ultra crepidam is a rule of mode- 
ration it repudiates; incessant energy provokes unabated 
meddling, and its intuitive qualities of penetration, adapta- 
tion, and concentration are only hindered by the accidents of 
life from carrying any one thing out to the point at least of 
respectable attainment. Look at Michael Angelo; poet, 
painter, sculptor, architect, and author : and if indeed we 
are not told of Milton having modeled, or Horace having 
built up other monument than his own imperishable fame, 
still nothing «but manual habit and the world's encourage- 
ment were wanting to perfect, in the concrete, the concep- 
tions of those plastic minds. Who will deny that Hogarth 
was a novelist and playwright, — if not indeed a heart-rending 
tragedian ? Who will refuse to those nameless monastic 
architects who planned and fashioned the fretted towers of 
Gloucester, the stern solidity of Durham, the fairy steeple of 
Strasburg, or the delicate pinnacles of Milan, the praise due 
to them of being genuine poets of the immortal Epic ? Phidias 
and Praxiteles, Canova and Thorwaldsen, are in this view 
real authors as undoubtedly as Homer or Dante, Sallust or 
Racine ; and to rise highest in this argument, the heavens 
and the earth are but mighty scrolls of an Omniscient Author, 
fairly written in a universal tongue of grandeur and beauty, 
of skill, poetry, philosophy, and love. 

But let me not seem to prove too much, and so leap over 



124 ALFRED; 

my horse instead of vaulting into the saddle : though author- 
ship may claim thus extensively every master-mind, from the 
Adorable Former of all things down to the humblest potter 
at his wheel fashioning the difficult ellipse ; still, in human 
parlance must we limit it to common acceptations, and think 
of little more than scribe, in the name of author. Never- 
theless, let such seeds of thought as here are carelessly flung 
out, nurtured in the good soil of charity, and not unkindly 
forced into foolish accusations of my own conceit, w 7 hereas 
their meaning is general, (as if forsooth selfishly dibbled in 
with vain particularity, and not liberally broadcast that he 
may run that reads,) — let such crude considerations excuse 
my own weak and uninjurious invasion of the provinces of 
other men. The wisdom for social purposes of infinitesimal 
division of labor may be proved good by working well ; but 
its lowering influences on the individual mind cannot be 
doubted : that an intelligent man should for a lifetime be 
doomed to watch a valve, or twist pin-heads, or wind cotton, 
or lacquer coffin-nails, cannot be improving; and while I 
grant great evil in my desultory excesses, still I may make 
some use of that argument in the converse, and plead that it 
is good to exercise the mind on all things. Thus, in my as- 
sumed metier of authorship, let notions be extenuated that 
popularly concern it little, and yield admittance to any 
thought that may lead to that Athenian desideratum, " some 
new thing." 

While the echoes of the name of Alfred still linger on the 
mind, and our patriotism looks back with gratitude on his 
thousand virtues unsullied by a fault, (at least that History, 
seldom so indulgent, has recorded,) — while we reflect that 
in him were combined the wise king, the victorious general, 
the enlightened scholar, the humble Christian, the learned 



A TRANSLATION. 125 

author, the excellent father, the admirable man in all public 
and private relations, in domestic alike with social duties, I 
cannot help wishing that forgetful England had raised some 
architectural trophy, as a worthy testimonial of Alfred the 
noble and the good. Whether Oxford, his pet child, — or 
Westminster Hall, as mindful of the code he gave us, — or 
Greenwich, as the evening resting-place of those sons of 
thunder whom the genius of Alfred first raised up to man 
our wooden walls, — should be the site of some great national 
memorial, might admit of question ; but there can be none 
that something of the kind has been owing now near upon 
a thousand years, and that it will well become us to claim 
boastingly for England so true, so glorious a hero. With a 
view to expedite this object, and strictly to bear upon the 
topic in author-fashion, it has come into my thoughts how 
much we w T ant a 

LIFE OF ALFRED: 

my little reading knows of none, beyond what dictionaries 
have gathered from popular history and vague tradition, 
rather than manuscripts of old time, and Asser the original 
biographer. Of this last work, written originally in Saxon, 
and since translated into Latin, I submit that a popular 
English version is imperatively called for; a translation from 
a translation being never advisable, (compare Smollett's An- 
glo-Gallified dilution of Don Quixote,) the primary source 
should be again consulted : and seeing that profound igno- 
rance of the ancient Saxon coupled with, as now, total 
indifference about its acquisition, place me in the list of 
incapables, I leave the good suggestion to be used by pun- 
dits of the Camden or Roxburghe or other book-learned 



126 NATIONAL MEMORIALS. 

Society. If it may have been already done by some neg- 
lected scribe, bring it to the light, and let us see the bright 
example set to all future ages by that early Crichton ; if 
never yet accomplished, my zeal is over-paid should the 
hint be ever acted on ; and if, which is still possible, an En- 
glish version of the life of Alfred should be positively rife 
and common among the reading public, your humble igno- 
ramus has nothing for it but to pray pardon of its author for 
not having known him, and to walk softly with the world for 
writing so much before he reads. 

But this is an accessory, an episode ; I plead for a statue 
to King Afred: and — (now for another episode ; is there no 
cure for these desperate parentheses?) — apropos of statues, 
let me, in the simple untaught light of nature, suggest a word 
or two with regard to some recent undertakings. Notwith- 
standing classical precedents, whereof more presently, it does 
seem ridiculous to common sense, to set a man like a sca- 
venger-bird at Calcutta, or a stork at Athens, or a sonorous 
Muezzin, or a sun-dried Simeon Stylites, on the top of a 
column a hundred feet high : sculpture imitates life, and who 
w r ould not shudder at such an unguarded elevation ? sculp- 
ture imitates life, and who can recognize a countenance so 
much among the clouds? Again for the precedents: I pre- 
sume that Pompey's pillar (w T hich, indeed, perhaps never 
had anything on its summit, except some Egyptian emblem, 
as the cap and throne of higher and lower Egypt, or a key 
of the Nile, as likely as anything), is the most notable, if 
not the first, of solitary columns: now, Pompey, or, as some 
prefer, Diocletian, and others Alexander Severus, had that 
fine pillar ferried over from the quarries of Lycian Xanthus ; 
at least, this is a good idea, seeing that near that place still 
lie three or four other columns of like gigantic dimensions, 



A PROPOSAL. 127 

unfinished, and believed to have been intended to support 
the triglyph of some new temple. Pompey's idea was to fix 
the pillar up as a sea-mark, for either entering the harbor of 
Alexandria, or to denote shallows, anchorage, or the like ; 
but apart from this actual utility, and apart also from its 
acknowledged ornament as a sentinel on that flat strand, I 
take it to be an architectural absurdity to erect a regular- 
made column with little or nothing to support: an obelisk 
now, or a naval trophy, or a tower decorated with shields, 
or a huge stele or cippus, or a globe, or a pyramid, or a Wal- 
tham-cross sort of edifice, (of course all these supporting 
nothing on their apices,) in fact, anything but a Corinthian or 
Tuscan, or other regular pillar, seems to me permissible; 
but, for base, shaft, and capital to have nothing to do but 
lift a telescopic man from earth's maternal surface, does look 
not a little unreasonable ; and therefore as much out of taste, 
as for the marble arch at Buckingham Palace to spend its 
energies in supporting a flag-staff. 

The magnificent column of Trajan is exempted from this 
hasty bit of criticism, (as also of course is its modern coun- 
terpart, Napoleon's,) because it is, both from decoration and 
proportions, out of the recognized orders of architecture : it 
partakes rather of the character of a triumphal tower, than 
of one among many pillars separated chiefly from the rest ; 
the man is a superlative accessory, a climax to his positive 
exploits ; he does not stand a-top, as if dropt from a balloon, 
but like a gallant climber treading on his conquests : and, as 
to Phocas's column at Rome, I shall only say, that it illus- 
trates my meaning, except in so far as an immense base to the 
superimposed statue redeems it from the jockey imputation 
of carrying too light a weight. Now, with respect to the 
Nelson memorial, your meddlesome scribe had an unex- 



128 NATIONAL MEMORIALS. 

hibited notion of his own. Mehemet A)i is understood to 
have given certain two obelisks respectively to the French 
and English nations : the Parisians appropriated theirs, and 
have set it up, thorn-like, in their midst, perhaps as an em- 
blem of what African conquest has been in the heartside of 
France; but we English, less imaginative, and therefore less 
antiquarian, have permitted our petit cadeau to lie among its 
ruins of Luxor or Karnac, unclaimed and unconsidered. 

Nelson of the Nile might have had this consecrated to his 
honor: and if, as is probable, it be of insufficient elevation, 
I should have proposed a high flight of steps and a base, 
screened all round by shallow Egyptian entrances, w 7 ith an 
Etruscan sarcophagus just w T ithin the principal one, (Egypt 
and Etruria were cousins germane,) and an alto-relievo of 
Nelson dying but victorious recumbent on the lid : the globe 
and w 7 ings, emblems alike of Nelson's rapidity, his universal 
fame, and his now emancipated spirit, might be sculptured 
over each entrance ; a sphinx, or a Prudhoe lion, being allu- 
sive to England as well as Egypt, should sit guardant at each 
corner of the steps ; and the three remaining doorways would 
be represented closed, and carved externally with some 
allegorical personations of Nelson's career, of the Nile, 
Copenhagen, and Trafalgar. This, then, had it been strictly 
in my metier, (a happy metier mine of literary leisure,) should 
have been my limned outline for the Nelson testimonial: the 
real interesting antique needle, rising from the midst of its 
solid Egyptian architecture, and pointing to the skies ; not a 
steeple, however, but merely the obelisk raised upon a heavy 
base, only hollowed far enough to admit of an interior alto- 
relievo. 

It is probable that the exhibition of designs, w T hich an alibi 
prevented me from seeing, included several obelisks; but 



A PROPOSAL. 129 

the peculiarities I should have insisted on, would have been 
first to make good use of the real thing, the rarely carved old 
Egypt's porphyry ; and, next, to have had our hero's likeness 
within reasonable distance of the eye. 

But to return from this other desperate digression: Alfred, 
the great and wise, deserves his Saxon cross ; or let him lie 
enshrined in a grove of florid Gothic pinnacles, a fretted roof 
on clustered columns reverently keeping off the rain ; or, best 
of all, let him stand majestic in his own-time costume, colos- 
sal bronze on a cube of granite, and so put to shame the ele- 
gancies of a Windsor uniform, and the absurdity of sticking 
heroes, as at St. George's, Bloomsbury, and elsewhere, on 
the summit of a steeple. So, friend, let all this tirade serve 
to introduce a most unlikely and chaotic treatise on 

NATIONAL MEMORIALS. 



Politics are a sore temptation to any writer, and of dalliance 
with a Dalilah so seductive it is futile to declare that I am 
innocent. My principles positively are known to myself; 
which is a measure of self-knowledge, in these anythingarian 
days, of that cabinet coin-climax the " 8th degree of rarity ;" 
and that those choice principles may not be concealed from 
so kind an eye as yours, friend reader, hear me profess my- 
self honestly, — if you approve, or shamelessly, — if you will 
so think it,— " a rabid Tory !" At least, by such a nomen- 
clature sundry veracious journals, daily leaders of the public 
opinion, would call me, were such a groundling as I prominent 
enough to attract their indignation; and, from all that can be 
gathered from their condemnatory clauses against others like- 
minded, I have no little reason to be proud of the title. For, 
9 



130 POLITICS; 

on collation of such clauses with their causes, I find, and 
therefore take (under correction always) the rabid Tory to be 
— a temperate lover of order, whom his mother has taught to 
" fear God," his father to " honor the king," and his pastor 
to " meddle not with them who are given to change." A 
rabid Tory, in matters of national expenditure, remembers 
to have heard an old unexploded proverb, " There is that 
scattereth, and yet increaseth, and there is that withholdeth 
what is due, but it tendeth to poverty ;" and he is by no 
means sure that a certain mismanaged nation is not immolat- 
ing her prosperity to what actuaries would call economical 
principles. A rabid Tory is bigoted enough to entertain a 
ridiculous fear of that generous abstraction, Catholic Rome, 
whom further he is sufficiently vulgar-minded to consider as 
a lady of easy virtue arrayed in the colors of a cardinal : he 
thinks one Luther to be somewhat more than a renegade 
monk ; and is childish enough to venerate, when a man, the 
same Liturgy which his grandmother had taught him when 
a boy. For other matters, the higher born, the better bred, 
the more classically educated, and the more extensively pos- 
sessed of moneys and lands our honest-spoken Tory may be, 
ten to one the more is he afflicted w T ith this rabies: and his 
mad propensities become positively criminal, when, as a 
magistrate or a captain of dragoons, he thinks himself bound 
in honorable duty to quell the enthusiasm of some disinte- 
rested patriots, whose innocent wishes rise no higher than to 
subvert the existing order of things, to secure for themselves 
a reasonable share of parks, palaces, and pocket-money, and 
(as the very justifiable means for so happy an end), manfully 
to sacrifice in the temple of Freedom the rogues who would 
object to being robbed, and the tyrants who would be bloody 
enough to fight for life and liberty. 



A MANUAL. 131 

A rabid Tory — you see it is a pet name of mine — feels no 
little contempt for a squeezable character; and he is well 
assured, from history as well as on his own conviction, that 
the noble army of martyrs lived and died upon his principles : 
whereas the retrograde regiment of cowards, whom the wis- 
dom of providing for personal safety has in battle induced 
to run away, relictis non bene parmulis, — the clamorous co- 
hort of bullies, whom the necessities of impending castigation 
have sensibly induced to eat their words, — the volunteer 
company of light-heeled swindlers, whom nature instructs 
that they must live, and honesty has neglected to inform 
how, — every one, in short, whose grand maxim (quocunque 
modo rem) is temporizing Expediency, and with w T hom the 
cogent argument u you shall" has more force than the silly 
conscience-whisper of u you ought," — contributes to swell 
the band which the professor of Toryism, the abstracted fol- 
lower of principles and not of men, has the honor of behold- 
ing in the angle of his -diagram, inscribed " contradictory." 
Not that your true Tory believes so ill of all his adversaries ; 
there are some few geese among the cranes ; an Abdiel here 
and there who has long felt irksome in the host, but for false 
shame is there still ; sundry men, having ambitious or illumi- 
nated wives, and too amiable, or too prudent, to attempt a 
breach of peace at home; some thronging the opposite benches, 
because their fathers and grandfathers topographically occu- 
pied those same seats, — a decent reason, supposing similarity 
of places and names, to insure similarity of principles and 
practice ; and some— (I dislike them not for honesty) — con- 
fessing and upholding the republican extremes, upon a belief 
that all short of these are but an unsatisfactory part of a great 
and glorious experiment. Now the rabid Tory prefers an 
open foe to a false friend ; but your go-between, your midway 



132 POLITICS ; 

sneak, your shuttlecock, your perjured miser who will swear 
to anything for an extra per-centage, — all these are his de- 
testation: and although he will readily acknowledge some 
good and some wise in the adversary's ranks, still he recog- 
nizes that tri-colored banner as the one under which all 
naturally fight, who are poor in both worlds, — with neither 
money nor religion. Thus much of my reasonable rabies. 

One may hate principles without hating men; and for this 
sentiment we have the Highest Example. Things are either 
right or wrong; if right, do, — if wrong, forbear: nothing can 
be absolutely indifferent, and to do a little actual evil in order 
to compass great hypothetical good is false morality, and there- 
fore bad government. Why should not honesty and plain- 
dealing be as inviolable publicly as privately ? Why be guilty 
of such mean self-stultification as to say one thing and do 
another? It is criminal in rulers to give a helping hand to 
evil which they deem unavoidable; let them, in preference, 
cease to rule, and imitate the noble threat of that king for 
half a century whose conscience bade him abdicate rather 
than do wrong. 

But to come abruptly on a Titlepage : oftentimes in read- 
ing deleterious leading articles in wrong-sided newspapers, 
have I longed to .set before the world of faction 

A MANUAL OF GOOD POLITICS, 

which indeed has already been half-done, if decently begun 
be synonymous. With this view has my Author's mind 
heretofore thought over many Scriptural texts, characters, 
doctrines, and usages ; yet, let me freely confess the upshot 
of those efforts to be little satisfactory ; for I fear much, that, 
though there be grounds enough to go upon for one who is 



A MANUAL. 133 

already fixed in right political principles, [orthodoxy being, 
as is common among arguers, my doxy,] there may not be 
sufficient so to reason from as to convince the thousands, 
ready and willing to gainsay them : and Locke's utter anni- 
hilation of poor ridiculous well-intentioned Filmer makes one 
wary of taking up and defending a position so little tenable, 
as, for instance, Adam's primary grant for the foundation of 
absolute monarchy, or of attempting to nullify natural freedom 
by the dubious succession of patriarchal power. At the same 
time, (competency for so great a task being conceded, — no 
small supposition by the way,) much remains to be done in 
this field of discourse : as, the fearful example made of Korah, 
Dathan, and Abiram, for conduct very analogous with 
numberless instances of modern Liberalism ; the rights of 
rulers as well as of the governed, of kings as well as people; 
the connection subsisting now, as through all former ages, 
between church and state, — well indeed and deeply argued 
out already by such great minds as Coleridge and Gladstone, 
but perhaps, for general usefulness, requiring a more brief 
and popular discourse; the question of passive obedience; 
the true though unfashionable doctrine of man's general 
depravity invalidating the consignment of power to the 
masses ; and so forth. There are, however, if Scripture is 
to be held a constitutional guide, some examples to a certain 
extent contrary to the argument: as, elective monarchy in the 
case of Saul : non-legitimate succession in families even 
where election is omitted, as in the case of Solomon; and, 
honestly to say it, many other difficulties of a like nature. 
In fact, upon the whole, this distinction might be drawn ; 
that although the Bible at large favors what we may, for 
shortness' sake, term Conservative politics, still it would not 
be easy to deduce from its pages a code of rules, so neces- 



134 WOMAN; 

sarily of a social, temporary, and accidental nature : the prin- 
ciple is given, but little of the practice ; the seed of true and 
undefiled religion produces among other good fruit what we 
will call Conservatism, but we must be very miscroscopic to 
detect that fruit in the seed: of this admission let my Liberal 
adversary make — as indeed he will — the most; but let him 
remember that truth has always been most economically dis- 
tributed. It is a material too costly to be broad-cast before 
swine ; and in slender evidence lurks more of moral test, 
than in stout arguments and open miracles. At any rate, as 
unfitted for the task, I leave it. For anything mine un-book- 
learned ignorance can tell, the very title may be as old as 
Christianity itself; it is a good name, and a fair field. 

This manual was commenced in the form of familiar let- 
ters to a Radical acquaintance, whom I had resolved to con- 
vert triumphantly ; but John Locke disarmed me, without, 
however, having gained a convert: he made me drop my 
weapons, as Prospero with Ferdinand; but the fault lay with 
Ferdinand, for want of equal power in the magic art. 



" Measures, not men" is, as we have hinted already, the 
ground- work of a true Tory's political creed; and measures 
themselves only in so far as they expound and are consistent 
with principles. A man may fail; the stoutest partisan be- 
come a renegado ; and the pet measure of a doughtiest 
champion may after all prove traitorous, unwise, unw T orthy: 
but principle is eternally an unerring guide, a master to 
whose words it is safe to swear, a leader whose flag is 
never lowered in compromise, nor sullied by defeat. Defal- 
cations of the generally upright, derelictions of duty by the 
usually noble-minded, shake not that man's faith which is 



A SUBJECT. 135 

founded on principle: for the cowardice, or rashness, or dis- 
honesty of some individual captain he may feel shame, but 
never for the Cause in which such hold commissions; he 
may often find much fault with soi-disant Tories, but never 
with the 'ism they profess. We overstep their follies; w r e 
disclaim their corruptions; we date above their faults ; we 
wash our hands of their abuses. An abstracted student in 
his chamber, building up his faith from the foundations, and 
trying every stone of the edifice, takes little heed of who is 
for him, and who against him, so Conscience is the architect, 
and the Master of the house looks on approving. A man's 
mind is but one whole; be it palace or hovel, feudal strong- 
hold or Italian villa, it is all of a piece: a duly subordinated 
spirit bears no superstructure of the Radical, and the friable 
soil of discontented Liberalism is too sandy a foundation for 
ponderous fanes of the religious. 

I rejoice in being accounted one of those unheroic, and 
therefore more useful, members of society w 7 ho profess to be 
by no means ambitious of reigning. A plain country gentle- 
man, with a mind (thank Heaven!) well at ease, and things 
generally, both external and internal, being in his case con- 
sentaneous with happiness, would appear to have reached 
the acme of human felicity; and no one but a fool cares, in 
any world, to exemplify the dog's preference for the shadow. 
Unenvious, therefore, of royalty, and fully crediting that 
never-quoted sentiment of Shakspeare's "Uneasy," &c, my 
motto, within the legitimate limits of right reason, and in 
common with that of some ridiculed philosopher of Round- 
head times, is the prudent saying, " Whoever's king, I'll be 
subject," — ay, and for the masculine I place the epicene. 
While, however, in sober practice of right subordination, 
and under existing circumstances of just rule, we gladly 



136 WOMAN; 

would amplify the maxim, (as in courtesy, gallantry, loyalty, 
and honest kind feeling strongly bound,) still in mere specu- 
lation, and irrespectively of things as they are, our abstract 
musings tended to approve the original word in its unextended 
gender. Every one of Edmund Burke's school would honor 
the ensign of Divine vice-regency wherever he found it; 
but, apart from this uninquisitive respect, he will claim to be 
reasonably patriotic, patriotically rational ; habit encourages 
to practice one thing, but theory may induce to think another. 
Now, little credence as so unenlightened, so illiberal an integer 
as I give to an equalization in the rights of man, certainly on 
many accounts my blindness gives less to the rights of women 
with man, and very far less to those rights over man : it might 
be inconvenient to be specific as to reason; but the working 
of an ultra-republican scheme, in which females should ballot 
as well as males, would briefly illustrate my meaning. Bar- 
barism makes gentle woman our slave; right civilization 
raises her into a loving helpmate; but what kind of wisdom 
exalts her into mastery? 

Readily, however, shall sleep in dull suppression sundry 
comments on a certain Rhenish law, whereof my Author's 
mind had at one time studiously cogitated a grave and whole- 
some homily. For our censor of the press, one strait-laced 
Mr. Better Judgment, has, "with his abhorred shears," 
clipped off the more eloquent and spirited portion of a tren- 
chant argument concerning — the revealed doctrine of a supe- 
rior sex, — the social evils of female domination, — church- 
headship considered as to type and antitype, — improper 
influences, — necessary hindrances, — anomalous example, — 
feminine infirmities, — and an infinitude more such various 
objections springing out of this fertile subject. Thereafter 
might have come the historical view, evils and perils, for the 



A SUBJECT. 137 

majority of instances, following in the wake of such mastery. 
However, to leave these questionable matters quiescent, the 
principles of passive obedience mildly interpose, forbidding 
to stir the waters of commotion, although with healing objects, 
for the sake of an abstract theory: there is ill-meant change 
enough afloat, without any call for well-intentioned meddlers 
to launch more. So, judicious afterthought resolves rather 
to strengthen too much weakened authority, in these ungo- 
vernable times, than attempt to prove its weaknesses inherent ; 
to look obstinately at the golden side only of the double- 
welded shield: instead of picking away at a soft stone in 
constitutional foundations, our feeble wish magnanimously 
prefers to prop it and plaster it, flinging away that injurious 
pickaxe. The title of this once-considered lucubration is 
far too suggestive to carping minds of more than the much 
that it means, to be without objection: nevertheless, I did 
begin, and therefore, always under shelter of a domino, and 
protesting against any w T ho w T ould move my mask, I con- 
fess to 

WOMAN, A SUBJECT: 

it was a mere speculative argument; a flock of fancies now 
roaming unregarded in some cloudy limbo. Let them fly 
into oblivion, — " black, white, and gray, with all their 
trumpery." 



Notwithstanding these present hostile argumentations, poli- 
tics are to me what they doubtlessly are to many others, 
subjects and disquisitions little short of hateful; perpetual 
mulligatawney; curried capsicums; a very heating, unsatis- 



138 FALSE STEPS; 

factory, unwholesome sort of food. How many pleasant 
dinner-parties have been abruptly broken up by the introduc- 
tion of this dish, — how many white waistcoats unblanched 
by projectile wineglasses on account of this impetuous theme, 
— how many little-civil wars produced from the pips of this 
apple of contention! — Yes, I hate it; and for this cause, 
good readers, (who may chance to have been used scurvily, 
some six pages back, in respect of your opinions, honest as 
my own, though fixed in full hostility, — and so, courteously be 
entreated for your pardons,) for this cause of hate, I beseech 
you to regard me as sacrificing my present inclinations to my 
future quiet. We have heard of women marrying men they 
may detest, — in order to get rid of them: even with such an 
object is here indited the last I ever intend to say about poli- 
tics. The shadows of notions fixed upon this page will cease 
to haunt my brain; and let no one doubt but that after relief 
from these pent-up humors, I shall walk forth less intolerant, 
less unamiable, less indignant than as heretofore. But, mean- 
while, suffer with all brevity that I say out this small say, and 
deliver my patriotic conscience; for many a headache has 
obfuscated your Author's mind in consequence of other abor- 
tive bits of political common-place. Every successive mea- 
sure of small triumphant Whiggery, every piece of what my 
view of the case would designate non-government or mis- 
government, has pinched, vexed, bruised, and stung my fer- 
ventcountry'slovedayby day, session aftersession. Like thou- 
sands of others, I have been a greyhound in the leash, a bolt 
in the bow, longing to take my turn on the arena ; eager as any 
Shrovetide 'prentice for a fling at negligence, peculation and 
injustice, and other the long black catalogue of British injuries. 
Socialism, Chartism, Ribandism; Spain, Canada, China; freed 
criminals, and imprisoned poverty ; penny wisdom, and pound 



A PAMPHLET. 139 

folly ; the universal centralizing system, corrupting all gene- 
rous individualities; patriotism ridiculed, and questionable 
loyalty patted on the back; vice in full patronage, and virtue 
out of countenance ; Protestantism discouraged, Popery taken 
by the hand ; Dissent of any kind preferred to sober Ortho- 
doxy; — and fitting climax, all this done under pretences of 
perfect wisdom, and most exquisite devotion to the crown 
and the constitution: — these things have made me too often 
sympathize in Colonel Crockett's humor, tiger-like, with a 
dash of the alligator. Accordingly, let me not deny having 
once attempted a bitter diatribe, in petto, surnamed 

FALSE STEPS; 

BRITAIN ; S HIGHROAD TO RUIN: 

a production of the pamphlet class, and like its confraternity, 
destined at longest to the life ephemeral. But, to say truth, 
I found all that sort of thing done so much better, spicier, 
cleverer, in numberless newspaper articles, than my lack of 
the particular knowledge requisite, and my little practice in 
controversy, could have managed, that I wisely drew in my 
horns, sheathed my toasting-iron, and decided upon not pro- 
ceeding political pamphleteer, till, on awaking some fine 
morning, I find myself returned to Parliament for an imma- 
culate constituency. 

Patient reader of whatever creed, do not hate me for my 
politics, nor despise the foolish candor of confession. Hence- 
forth, I will not trouble you, but abjure the subject; except, 
indeed, my sturdy friend " the Squire," soon to be introduced 
to you, insists upon his after-dinner topic : but we will cut 
him short ; for, in fact, nothing can be more provoking, tedi- 



140 KING'S EVIDENCE 

ous, useless, and causative of ill blood, than this perpetual 
intermeddling of private ignoramuses, like him and me, with 
matters they do not understand, nor can possibly ameliorate. 



A poet is born a poet, as all the world is well aware ; and 
your thoroughpaced lawyer is not less born a lawyer; while 
the junction of these two most militant incompatibles clearly 
bears out the hackneyed quotation as above, with the final 
misfit, that is, " non fit." Your poetaster at the bar is that 
grotesque ideal, which Flaccus thought so funny that his 
friends must laugh; (although really, Romans, it is possible 
to contemplate a sort of Sphinx figure, " a human head to a 
horse's neck," and so on, varied plumes and all, without 
much chance of a guffaw ;) and yonder sickly-looking clerk 
perched upon his high stool, penning " stanzas while he 
should engross," is the lugubrious caricature of Apollo on 
his Pegasus, with Helicon for inkstand. 

It may be nothing extraordinary that, jostled in so wide a 
theatre as ours of the world, chance-comers should not, at 
once or at all, comfortably find their proper places; but that 
wise-looking chaperons, having with prospective caution duly 
taken a box, should by malice prepense thrust all the big 
people in front, and all the little folks behind, is rather hard 
upon the latter, and not a little foolish in itself. Even so in 
life : who does not wish a thousand times he could help some 
people to change places? Look at this long fellow, fit for 
Frederick of Prussia's regiment of Giants; — his parents and 
guardians have bent him double, broken his spirit, and spoiled 
his paces, by cramming him, a giraffe in the stable, between 
that frigate's gun-decks as a middy: while yonder martial 
little bantam, by dint of exaggerated heels and exalted bear- 



A SATIRE. 141 

skin, peeps about among his grenadiers, much as Brutus and 
Cassius did with their colossal Ceesar. So also of minds: 
look at brilliant Burns, — the exciseman; and quaintly versa- 
tile Lamb,— the common city clerk: Look at — had you only 
patience, you should have examples by the gross ; but, to 
make a shorter tale of it, — (I presume this shows the etymo- 
logy of cur-tail,) — just think over the pack of your acquaint- 
ance, and see if you could not shuffle those kings, queens, 
yes, and knaves too, more to your satisfaction, and their own 
advantage: at least so most folks imagine, silly meddlers as 
they are; for, after all, what with human versatility, and the 
fact of a probationary state, and the influence of habit, and 
the drudging example set by others, things work so kindly 
as they are, that, notwithstanding misfits, the wiser few must 
be of Pope's mind, lt whatever is, is right ;" — ay, that it is. 
A year or two ago, — if your Author is little better than one 
of the foolish now, what in charity must he have been then ? 
— I took it upon me to indite an innocent stingless satire, 
whereof for samples take the following. Skip them, one and 
all ; you will, if you are wise, for they bear the ban of rhyme, 
are peevish, dull, ill-reasoned; but if you are not wise, (and, 
strange to say, malicious people tell me there are many such,) 
you may wish to see in print a metred inconclusive grumble. 
Take it then if you will, as I do, merely for a change; at 
any rate, your manciple has furnished this buttery of yours 
with ample choice of viands; and omnivoracious as man may 
be, — gormandizing with gusto fat moths in Australia, cock- 
chafers at Florence, frogs in France, and snails in Switzer- 
land, equally as all less objectionable meats, drinks, fruits, 
roots, composites and simples, — still, in reason, no one can 
be expected or expect himself to like everything: have charity, 



142 KING'S EVIDENCE; 

for what suits not one man's taste may please the palate of 
another; so hear me complacently turn 

" KING'S EVIDENCE," 

and give heed to certain confessions, extorted under the peine 
forte et dure of a whilom state legal. Yet, when I come to 
consider of this, (mini cogitanti, as school-themes invariably 
commenced,) it strikes my memory that all confessions short 
of the last dying one are weak and foolish impertinences ; 
whether Jean Jacques or Mr. Adams thought so, or caused 
others to think so, are separate topics beside the question : 
for myself, I will spare you a satire dotted with as many I's 
as an Argus pheasant; and, without exacting upon good- 
nature by troublesome contributions, will hazard a few cou- 
plets concerning Blackstone's cast-off mistress, the Law. 
One word more though : undoubting of thine amiability, 
friend that hast walked with me hitherto in peace, I will be 
tame as a purring cat, and sheathe my talons; therefore are 
you still unteased by divers sly speeches and sarcastic hints 
of and concerning innumerable black sheep that crowd about 
a woolsack ; especially of certain " highly respectables," 
whom the omnipotence of Parliament (no less power presum- 
ably being competent) commands to be accounted " gentle- 
men." Should then my meagre sketches seem but little 
spiteful, accord me credit for tolerance at the expense of wit, 
(yea, in mine own garbled satire, hear it, Juvenal!) and view 
them kindly in the same light as you would sundry emascu- 
lated extracts from a discreet Family Shakspeare. Indigna- 
tion ever speaks in short sharp queries ; and it is well for the 
printer's pocket that the self-experience hereof was con- 
sidered inadmissible, for a new fount of notes of interrogation 



A SATIRE. 143 

must have been procured : as it is, we are sailing quietly on 
the Didactic Ocean, and have I fear been engaged some time 
upon topics actionable on a charge of scandalum magnatum. 
Hereof then just a little sample : let us call it " a judgment 
in the Rolls Court;" or in any other; I care not. 

Precedent's slave, this mountebank decides 

As great Authority, not Reason, guides. 

" 'Tis not for him, degenerate wight, to say 

Faults can be mended at this time of day, 

For Coke himself declar'd — no matter what, — 

Can Justice suffer what Lord Coke would not? 

And if 1 Siderfin, p. 10, you scan, 

Lord Hoax has fix'd the rule, — that learned man : 

I cannot, dare not, if I w r ould, be just, 

My hands are tied, and follow Hoax I must ; 

That very learned Lord could not be wrong. 

Besides, — in fact, it has been settled long, 

For the great case of Hitchcock versus Bundy 

Decided — (Cro. Eliz. per Justice Grundy), 

That [black was white] ; — and so, what can I say? 

Landmarks are things must not be moved away: 

I cannot put the clock of Wisdom back, 

And solemnly pronounce that black is black. 

Though plaintiff has the right, — I grant it clear, — 

I must be ruled by Hoax and Hitchcock here : 

Equity follows, does not mend the laws; 

Therefore declare, defendant gains the cause." 

Then, as virtuously bound, Indignation interrogates sun- 
dry ejaculations, — or, if you like it better, ejaculates sundry 
interrogations : as thus, take a brace: 



POETICS j 

If right and reason both combine in one, 
Why, in God's name, should Justice not be done? 
If law be not a lie, and Judgments jokes, 
Why not be just, — and cut adrift Lord Hoax ? 

After a vast deal more in this vein of literature, — for you 
perceive my present purpose is dissection in part of this 
auncient rhyme, — we arrive at a magnanimous 

No ! Right shall have his own, put off no longer 
By rule of Former, or by whim of Stronger ; 
Nor, because Jack goes tumbling down the hill, 
Shall precedent create a tumbling Jill. 
Public opinion soon shall change the scene, 
And wash the Law's Augsean stable clean ; 
Sweep out the Temple, drive the sellers thence, 
And lead, in novel triumph, Common Sense. 

Verily, this is of the dullest, but it is brief: endure it, and 
pray you consider the deadliness of the topic, and the bar- 
barous cruelty wherewith courtesy has clipped the wings of 
my poor spite. Let us turn to other Titlepages ; assuring 
all the world that no specific mountebank has been here 
intended, and that nothing more is meant than a nerveless 
blow against legal cant, quainter than Quarles's, and against 
that well-known species of Equity, which must have been 
so titled from like antiquated reasons with those that induced 
Numa and his company to call a dark grove, lucus. 



How many foes, in this utilitarian era, has that very un- 
warrantable vice, called Poetry! All who despise love and 



A MELANGE. 145 

love-making, all who prefer billiards to meditation, all who 
value hard cash above mental riches, feel privileged to hate 
it; while really, typographers, the illegible diamond print in 
which you generally set it up, whether in book, or news- 
paper, or handbill, or magazine, induces many an indifferent 
peruser to skip the poem for the sake of his eyesight. I 
presume that the monosyllable, rhyme, comprehends pretty 
nearly all that the world at large intends by poetry ; and, in 
the same manner as certain critics have sneered at Livy — 
no, it was Tacitus — for commencing his work with a bad 
hexameter, so many a reader will now-a-days condemn a 
whole book, because it is somewhere found guilty of har- 
boring a distich. But poetry, friend World, means far other 
than rhyme; its etymology would yield " creation," or "fa- 
brication," of sense as well as sound, and of melody for the 
eye as well as melody for the ear. So did [epoiese] Milton ; 

and so did not , well, I myself, if you will. Yet in fact 

there are fifty other kinds of poetries, besides the poetry of 
w T ords: as, the poetry of life, — affection, honor, and hope, 
and generosity ; the poetry of beauty, — never mind what fea- 
tures decorate the Dulcinea, for this species of poetry is felt 
and seen almost only in first love; the poetry of motion, 
as first-rates majestically sailing, furiously scudding waves, 
bending corn-fields, and briefly all things movable but rail- 
way-trains ; the poetry of rest, as pyramids, a tropical calm, 
an arctic winter, and generally all things quiescent but a 
slumbering alderman ; the poetry of music, heard oftener in 
a country milkmaid's evening song, than in many a concert- 
room ; the poetry of elegance, more natural to weeping wil- 
lows, unbroken colts, flames, swans, ivy-clad arches, grey- 
hounds, yea, to young donkeys, than to those pirouette-ing 
and very active danseuses of the Opera ; the poetry of nature, 
10 



146 POETICS; 

as mountains, waterfalls, storms, suramer-evenings, and all 
manner of landscapes except Holland and Siberia; the po- 
etry of art, aqueducts, minarets, Raphael's coloring, and 
Poussin's intricate designs ; the poetry of ugliness, well seen 
in monkeys and Skye terriers; and the poetry of awkward- 
ness, whereof the brightest example is Mr. Transatlantic 
Rice. And, verily, many other poetries there be, as of im- 
pudence (for which consult the experience of swindlers) ; of 
prose (for which see Addison) ; of energy, of sleep, of battle, 
and of peace: for it is an easy-seeming artfulness, the most 
fascinating manner of doing as of saying, complication sim- 
plified, and everything effected to its bravest advantage. 
Poetry wants a champion in these days who will save her 
from her friends: namby-pamby " lovers of the Nine," 
your innumerous dull lyrics, — ay and mine, — your unnatural 
heroics, — I too have sinned thus, — your up-hill sonnets, — 
that labor of folly have I known as well, — in brief, your 
misnamed poetry hath done grievous damage to the cause 
you toil for. Yet I would avow thus much, for I believe it ; 
as an average, w T e have beaten our ancestors; seldom can 
we take up a paper or a periodical which does not show us 
verses worthy of great names ; the age is full of highly re- 
spectable if not superlative poetry ; and truly may we con- 
sider that the very abundance of good versification has 
lowered the price of poets, and therefore, in this marketing 
world, has robbed them of proper estimation. Doubtless, 
there have been mighty men of song higher in rank, as 
earlier in time, than any now who dare to try a chirrup : but 
there are also many of our anonymous minstrels, with whom 
the greater number of the so-called old English poets could 
not with advantage to the ancients justly be compared. Look 
at Johnson's Lives: who can read the book, and the speci- 



A MELANGE. 147 

mens it glorifies, without rejoicing in his prose, and tho- 
roughly despising their poetry? — With a few brilliant excep- 
tions, of course, (for ill-used Milton, Pope, — and shall we 
in the same sentence put Dryden ? — are there,) a more 
wretched set of halfpenny-a-liners never stormed mob-trod- 
den Parnassus. The poetry of Queen Anne's time and 
thereabouts, I judge to have been at the lowest bathos of 
badness ; all satyrs, and swains, fulsome flattery of titles, and 
foolish adoration of painted shepherdesses; poor weak hob- 
bling lines, eked out by 'eds and expletives, often terminated 
by false rhymes, and made lamer by triplets and dreary 
Alexandrines; ill-selected subjects, labored, indelicate, or 
impossible similes, passions frigid as Diana, wit's weapons 
dull as lead. Yet these, (many exceptions doubtless there 
were, and many redeeming morceaux even in the w T orst, 
charitable reader, but as of the rule we speak not falsely,) 
these are the poets of England, the men our great grand- 
fathers delighted to honor, the feared, the praised, the pen- 
sioned, and those whom we their children still denominate — 
the poets! Praise, praise your stars, ye lucky imps of Fame! 
who could tolerate you now-a-days? — You lived in golden 
times, when Dorset, Harley, Bolingbroke, Halifax and Com- 
pany, gave away places of a thousand a year, as but justly 
due to any man who could pen a roaring song, fabricate a 
fulsome sonnet, or bewail in meagre elegiacs the still-resist- 
ing virtue of some persecuted Stella! Happy fellows, easy 
conquisitors of wealth and fame, autocrats of coffee-houses, 
feted and favored by town-bred dames! In those good old 
times for the fashionable Nine, an epic was sure to lead to a 
Ministry-of-State, and even an epigram produced its pension: 
to be a poet, or reputed so, was to be — eligible for all things ; 
and the fortunate possessor of a rhyming dictionary might 



14S POETICS; 

have governed Europe with his metrical protocols. But these 
halcyon times are of the past, — and so, verily, are their 
heroes. Farewell, a long farewell, children of oblivion! 
farewell, Spratt, Smith, Duke, Hughes, King, Pomfret, Phil- 
lips, and Blackmore: ye who, in that day of very small 
things, just rose, as your Leviathan biographer so often tes- 
tifies, " to a degree of merit above mediocrity:" ye who, — 
but (Candor and good Charity, I thank you for the hint,) 
limited indeed is my knowledge of your writings, ye long 
departed poets, whom I thus am base enough to pilfer of 
your bays; and therefore if any man among you penned 
aught of equal praise with " My mind to me a kingdom is," 
or "No glory I covet, no riches I want," humbly do I cry 
that good man's pardon. Believe that I have only seen the 
chateau of your fame, but never the rock on which it rested; 
and therefore candidly consider, if I might not with reason 
have accounted it a castle in the air ? 

Now, after this wholesale species of poetical massacre, 
this rifling of old Etruscan tombs of their honorable spoil, a 
very pleasant ninny would that poetaster stand forth, whose 
inanely conceited daring exhibited specimens from his own 
mint, as medals in fit contrast with those slandered " things 
of base alloy." No, as with politics, so with poetry; in 
public I abjure and do renounce the minx: and although 
privately my Author's mind is so silly as to doat right lovingly 
on such an ancient mistress, and has wasted much time and 
paper in her praise or service, still that mind is sufficiently 
self-possessed in worldly prudence, as to set seemingly little 
store on the worth of an acquaintance so little in the fashion. 
Therefore I disown and disclaim 



A MELANGE. 149 



A VOLUME OF POETICS, 

ill-fated offspring of a foolish father ; miscellaneous collection 
of occasionals and fugitives, longer or shorter, as the army of 
Bombastes. Poetical as in verity I must confess to have 
been, (using the word u poetical" as most men use it, and 
the words " have been" in the sense of Troy's existence,) 
there must have lingered in me, even at that hallucinating 
period, some little remnant of prosaic wisdom ; for it is now 
long since that I consigned to the most voracious of elements 
all the more lovesick rhythmicals, and all the more hateful 
satiricals. Now, I will maintain that act of incremation to 
be one of true heroism, nearly equal to the judgment of 
Brutus; nor less is it matter of righteous boasting to have 
immolated (warned by Charles Lamb's ghost) divers albu- 
minous perpetrations, which to have to do were, Clio knows, 
little pleasure, and to have done, we all know, as little praise. 
Such light follies are like skeins of cotton, or adjectives, or 
babies, unfit to stand alone ; haply, well enough, times and 
things considered, but totally unworthy to be dragged out of 
their context into the imperishability of print ; it is to take 
flies out of treacle, and embalm them in clear amber. 

As to sonnets, what real Author's mind will not, if honest, 
confess to the almost daily recurrence of that symptom of his 
disease? With mine, at least, they have increased, and are 
increasing ; yea, more, — as a certain statesman suggested of 
Ireland's multitudinous pisantry, or as tavern patriots declare 
of the power of the Crown, — they ought to be diminished. 
Nevertheless, resolutely do I hope that some of these at least 
are little worthy of the days of good Queen Anne. 

In matters of the sacred muse, lengthily as others have I 



150 HUMORISTICS; 

trespassed heretofore : the most protracted fytte, however, 
made a respectable inroad on a new metrical version of the 
Psalms, attempting at any rate closer accuracy from the 
Hebrew than Brady's, and juster rhymes than Sternhold's: 
but this has since been better done by another bard. On the 
whole budget of exploded poeticals is now legibly inscribed 
" to be kept till called for," a period rather more indefinite 
than the promise of a spendthrift's payment. Let them rest 
in peace, those unfortunate poetics ! 

There are also in the bundle, if I rightly do remember me, 
sundry metricals of the humorous sort, w^hich may be con- 
sidered as really waste-failures as any tainted hams that ever 
were yclept Westphalias. For of all dreary and lugubrious 
perpetrations in print, nothing can be more desolate than 
labored witticism. A pun is a momentary spark dropt upon 
the tinder-box of social intercourse ; and to detach such a 
sentence from its producing circumstances, is about as effica- 
cious a method of producing laughter, as the scintillatory flint 
and steel struck upon wet grass w r ould be of generating light. 
Few things are less digestible than abortive efforts at the 
humorous ; the stream of conversation instantly freezes up; 
the disconcerted punster wears the look of his well-known 
kinsman, the detected pickpocket ; and a scribe, so merci- 
lessly suicidal as regards his better fame, deserves, when a 
plain blunt jury comes to sit upon the body, to be found in 
mystical Latin, felo de se, or in plain English " a fellow 
deceased." 

" There shall come in the last days, scoffers ;" those same 
last days in which " many shall run to and fro, and know- 
ledge shall be increased." It is true that these phrases 
(quoted with the deepest reverence, though found in lighter 
company) are forcibly taken from their context; but still the 



A MEDLEY. 151 

judgment of many wise among us will agree that they pre- 
sent a remarkable coincidence : in this view of the case, and 
it is a most serious one, the concurrent notoriety of humor 
having just risen like a Phoenix from its ashes, of railroads 
and steamboats having partially annihilated space, and of the 
strides which education, if not intellect, has made upon the 
highroad of human improvement, assumes an importance 
greater than the things themselves deserve. To a truly phi- 
losophic ken, there is no such thing as a trifle; the ridiculous 
is but skin-deep, papillae on the surface of society; cut a lit- 
tle deeper, you will find the veins and arteries of wisdom. 
Therefore will a sober man not deride the notion that comic 
almanacs, comic Latin grammars, comic hand-books of 
sciences and arts, and the great prevalence of comicality in 
popular views taken of life and of death, of incident and of 
character, of evil and of good, are, in reality, signs of the 
times. These straws, so thick upon the wind, and so injuri- 
ously mote-like to the visual organs, are flying forward be- 
fore a storm. As symptoms of changing nationality, and of 
a disposition to make fun of all things ancient, and honorable, 
and wise, and mighty, and religious, they serve to evidence 
a state of the universal mind degenerated and diseased. Still, 
let us not be too severe, — and, as to individual confessions, 
let not me play the hypocrite. Like everything else, good 
in its good use, and evil only in abuse of its excesses, humor 
is capable of filling, and has filled, no lightly-estimable part 
in the comedy of temporal happiness. What a good thing it 
is to raise an innocent and cheerful laugh ; to inoculate morose- 
ness with hearty merriment ; to hunt away misbelieving care, 
if not with better prayers, at the lowest with a pack of yelp- 
ing cachinnations; to make pain forget his headache by the 
anodyne of mirth ! Truly, humor has its laudable and kindly 



152 HUMORISTICS; A MEDLEY. 

uses : it is the mind's play-time after office-drudgery, — an 
easy recreation from thought, anxiety, or study. Only when 
it usurps, or foolishly attempts to usurp, the office of more 
than a temporary alleviation ; when it affects to set up as an 
atheistic panacea ; when it professes to walk as an abiding 
companion, lighting you on your way with injurious gleams 
(as that dreadful figure in Dante, who lanterns his path by 
the glaring eyes of his own truncated head) ; and when it 
ceases to become merely the casual scintillation, the flitting 
ignis fatuus of a summer evening, — then only is wit to be 
condemned. Often, for mine own poor part in this most 
mirthful age, have I had 

HEARTY LAUGHS 

IN PROSE AND VERSE; 

but take no thought of preserving their echoes, or of shrining 
them in the eternal basalt of print, like to the oft-repeated 
cries of Lurley's hunted indweller. The humorus infection 
caught also me, as a thing inevitable ; but the case, I wot, 
proved an unfavorable one : and who dare enter the arena of 
contention with these mighty men of Momus, these acknow- 
ledged sages of laughter, (pardon me for omitting some fifty 
more,) so familiar to the tickled ear, as Boz, and Sam Slick, 
Ingoldsby, and Peter Plymley, Titmarsh, Hood, Hook ; not 
to mention — (but that artists are authors) — laughter-loving 
Leech, Pickwickian Phiz, and inimitable Cruikshank ? 
Nevertheless, let a tender conscience penitently ask, is it 
quite an innocent matter to lend a hand in rendering the age 
more careless than perchance, but for such ministrations, it 
would cease to be ? Is it quite w T ise in a writer, by follow- 



JOURNALS; A DECADE. 153 

ing in that wake, to be reputed at once to help in doing harm, 
and help to do harm to his own reputation ? There are pro- 
fessors enough in this quadrangle of the college of amusement, 
popular and extant in flourishing obesity, without so dull a 
volunteer as Mr. Self intruding his humors on the world : and 
surely the far-echoing voices of a couple of canons, thunder- 
ing their mirth throughout Europe from the jolly quarters of 
St. Paul's, may well frighten into silence a poor solitary pop- 
gun, which, as the frog with the bull, might burst in an attempt 
at competition, or, like Bottom's Numidian lion, could imitate 
the mighty roar only as gently as your sucking-dove. 



Grapho-mania, or the love of scribbling, is clearly the 
great distinguishing characteristic of an Author's mind ; pen 
and ink are to it, what bread and butter are to its lodging- 
house the body: observe, we do not hazard a remark so false as 
that the one produces the other, — their relations are far from 
being mutual ; but we only suggest that the mind, as well 
as the body, hobbles like a three-legged OEdipus, resting on 
its proper staff of life. And what can be more provocative 
of scribbling than travel ? How eagerly we hasten to de- 
scribe unheard-of adventures, how 7 anxiously record exagge- 
rated marvels ! to prove some printed hand-book quite wrong 
in the number of steps up a round-tower: or to crush, as a 
wicked vender of execrable wines, the once fair fame of some 
overcharging innkeeper! Then, again, how pleasant to im- 
mortalize the holiday, and read in after-years the story of that 
happy trip langsyne ; how pleasant to gladden the kind eyes 
of friends, that must stay at home, w T ith those wonder-telling 
journals, and to taste the dulcet joys of those first essays at 
authorship. A great charm is there in jotting down the day's 



154 JOURNALS; A DECADE. 

tour, and in describing the mountains and museums, the lakes 
and lazzaroni, the dishes and disasters that have made it 
memorable: moreover, for fixing scenery on the mental retina, 
as well as for comparison of notes as to an alibi, for duly 
remembering things heard and seen, as well as for being 
humbled in having (as a matter inevitable) left unseen just 
the best lion of the whole tour, journals are a most praise- 
worthy pastime, and usually rank among the earliest efforts 
of an embryo Author's mind. 

It is a thing of commonest course, that, in this age of in- 
veterate locomotion, your present humble friend, now talking 
in this candid fashion with your readership, has been every- 
where, seen everything, and done his touristic devoirs like 
everybody else about him: also, as a like circumstance of 
etymological triviality, that he has severally, and from time 
to time, recorded for self-amusement and the edification of 
others all such matters as holiday-making schoolboys and 
boarding-misses, and government-clerks in their swift-speed- 
ing vacation, and elderly gentlemen vainly striving to enjoy 
their first fretful continental trip, usually think proper to 
descant upon. Of such manuscripts the world is clearly full ; 
no catacomb of mummies more fertile of papyri ; no traveler 
so poor but he has by him a packet of precious notes, whereon 
he sets much store: every tourist thinks he can reasonably 
emulate clever Basil Hall, in his eloquent fragments of 
voyages and travels ; and I, for my part, a truthteller to my 
own detriment, am ashamed to confess the existence of 

A DECADE OF JOURNALS ; 

which of olden time my cacoethes produced as regularly as 
recurred the summer solstice. Unlike that of Livy's, I am 



LAY HINTS : AN APPEAL. 155 



satisfied that this poor Decade be irrevocably lost; but, for 
dear recollection's sake of days gone by, intend it at least to 
be spared from malicious incremation. Records of roamings 
in romantic youth, witnesses of wayward wayside wanderings, 
gayly with alliterative titles might your contents, a la Roscoe, 
be set forth. But — what conceivable news can be told at 
this time of day about the trampled Continent, and the crowded 
British isles? Had my luck led me to Lapland or Formosa, 
to Mexico or Timbuctoo, to the top of Egyptian pyramids or 
the bottom of Polish salt-mines, my authorship w ? ould long 
since have publicly declared, in common with many a 
monkey, that it had u seen the world." As things are, to 
Bruce, Buckingham, Belzoni, and that glorious anomaly, the 
blind brave Holman, let us leave the harvest of praise, worthy 
to be reaped as their own by modern travelers. 



More, yet more, most exemplary of listeners ; and a web 
or webs of very various texture. Let any man tell truths of 
himself and seem to be consistent, if he can. From grave 
to gay, from simple to severe, is the line most expressive of 
such foolish versatility as mine ; varium et mutabile semper, 
to one thing constant never. I have heard, or read, among 
the experiences of a popular preacher, that one of his most 
vexatious petty temptations was the rise of humorous notions 
in his mind the moment he stepped into the pulpit ; and it 
is well known that many a comic actor has been afflicted 
w T ith the blackest melancholy while supporting right faceti- 
ously his best, because most ludicrous character. Let such 
thoughts then as these, of the frailties incident to man, serve 
to excuse the present juxtaposition of fancies in themselves 
diametrically opposite. 



156 LAY HINTS 

It is proper to preamble somewhat of apology before an- 
nouncing the next presumptuous tractate ; presumptuous, be- 
cause affecting to advise some thousands of men whose office 
alike and average character are sacred, and just, and excel- 
lent. Why then intrude such unrequired counsel? Read 
the next five pages, and take your answer. Zealously in- 
flamed for the cause of truth, if not also charitably wroth 
against sundry lukewarm cumber-earth incumbents, and 
certainly more in love with the Church-of-England prayer- 
book than with her noways-extenuated evils of omission or 
commission, I wrote, not long since, [ — and truly, not long 
since, for few things in this book can boast of higher antiquity 
than a most modern existence, some things being the birth 
of an hour, some of a day, a w T eek, or a month ; and not more 
than one or two above a twelvemonth's age. — Alas, for 
Horace's forgotten counsels! — alas, for Pope's and Boileau's 
reiterated prescription of revisal for — morbleu et parbleu — 
nine years!] — I wrote then a good cantle of an essay addressed 
to the clergy on some matters of judicious amelioration, 
which we will call, if you please, — and if the word hints be 
not objectionable, — 

LAY HINTS. 

Now, as to the unclerical authorship of this, it is wise that it 
be done out of metier. Laymen are more likely to gain at- 
tention in these matters, from the very fact of their influence 
being an indirect one, speaking as they do rather from the 
social arm-chair, the high-stool of the counting-house, or the 
benches of whilom St. Stephen's, than ex cathedra as of 
office and of duty. 

It would be a fair exemplification of the stolid prowess of 



AN APPEAL. 157 

a Quixote tilting against, yea, stouter foes than windmills, 
were I to have commenced with an attack upon external 
church-architecture: this topic let us leave to the fraternity 
of builders ; only asking, by what rule of taste an obelisk-like 
spire is so often stuck upon the roof of a Grecian temple, and 
by what rule of convenience gigantic columns so commonly 
and resolutely sentinel the narrowest of exits and entrances. 
Let us be more commonly contented, as well we may, w T ith 
our grand, appropriate, and impressive indigenous kind of 
architecture, — Gothic, Norman, and Saxon : the temple of 
Ephesus was not suitable to be fitted up with galleries, nor 
was the Parthenon meant to be surmounted by a steeple. 
But all this is useless gossip. 

Similarly Quixotic would be any tirade against pews, those 
pet strongholds of snug exclusive selfishness; bad in principle, 
as perpetually separating within wooden walls members of 
the same communion; unwholesome in practice, confining 
in those antre-like parallelograms the close-pent air ; un- 
sightly in appearance, as any one will testify, whose soul is 
exalted above the iron beauties of a plain conventicle ; ex- 
pensive in their original formation, their fittings and repairs; 
and, when finished, occupying perhaps one-fourth of the area 
of a church already ten times too small for its neighboring 
population. Fixed benches, or a strong muster of chairs, or 
such modes of congregational accommodation as public meet- 
ing-rooms and ordinary lecture-rooms present, seem to me 
more consistent and more convenient. But all this again is 
vain talking, — a very empty expenditure of words ; we must 
be satisfied with churches as they are; and, after all, let me 
readily admit that steeples are imposing in the distance, and 
of use as belfries ; (probably of like intent were the strange 
columnar towers of Ireland;) and with regard to pew r s, let 



158 LAY HINTS 

me confess that practice finds perfect what theory condemns 
as wrong, so, — let these things pass. 

Nevertheless, let me begin upon the threshold with the 
extortionate and abominable race of pew-women, beadles, 
clerks, vergers, bell-ringers, and other fee-hungry ravens 
hovering around and about almost every hallowed precinct: 
pray you, reform all that, and copy railroad companies in 
forbidding those begrudged gratuities to mendicant and ever- 
grumbling menials. Next, give more sublunary heed, we 
beseech you, to the comforts or discomforts incidental to 
doors, windows, stoves, paint, dust, dirt, and general ventila- 
tion ; consider the colds, fevers, lumbagos, rheums, life-long 
aches, and fatal pains too often caught helplessly and need- 
lessly by the devout worshiper in a town or country church. 
Look to your organist, that he wot something of the value of 
time and the mysteries of tune; or, if a country parson, drill 
cleverly that insubordinate phalanx of soi-disant musicians, a 
rustic orchestra; and exclude from the latter, at all mortal 
hazards, the huntsman's horn, the volunteer fiddle, and the 
shrill squeaking of the wry-necked pipe. Much is being now 
done for congregational psalmody; but when will country 
folks give up their murderous execution of the fugue-full 
anthem, and when will London congregations understand 
that the singing-psalms are not set apart exclusively for 
charity-children? When shall Bishop Kenn's "Awake my 
soul," cease to be our noonday exhortation ; and a literal 
invocation for sweet sleep to close our eyelids no longer be 
the ill-considered prelude to an afternoon discourse? Take 
some trouble to improve and educate, or get rid of, if possi- 
ble, your generally vulgar, illiterate, ill-conditioned clerk ; 
insist upon his v's and h's ; let him shut up his shoe-stall; 
and raise in the scale of society one of the leaders of its 



AN APPEAL. 159 

worship: as, at present, these stagnant, recreant, ignorant 
clerks are sad stumbling-blocks ; no help to the congregation, 
and a nuisance to its minister. In reading, — suffer this 
foolishness, my masters, — fight against the too frequent style 
of dogged, dormant, dull formality; we take you for earnest 
living guides to our devotion, not mere dead organs of an 
oft-repeated service ; quicken us by your manner ; a psalm 
so spoken is better than the sermon. In more fitting places 
has your Author long ago delivered his mind concerning mat- 
ters of a character more directly sacred than shall here find 
room ; as, the sacrament with its holy mysteries, and the 
many things amendable in ordinary preachments : but for 
these my unseasonable Wisdom shrouds itself in Silence: 
therefore, to do away with details, and apply a general rule, 
above all things, and in all things, strive by judicious acqui- 
escence with human wants, and likings, and failings too, if 
conscientiously you can, as well as by spirited and true devo- 
tion, to break down the sluggish mounds of needful uni- 
formity, and to build up round the church a rampart of good 
sense: and so, Heaven bless your labors! A word more: 
if it be possible, take no fees at a baptism, and let it not be 
thought by either rich or poor, that an entrance into Christ's 
fold must be paid for; no, nor at a burial ; but let the service 
for the Christian dead be accorded freely, without money and 
without price. To a wedding, the same ideas are not per- 
haps so closely applicable, therefore we will generously suffer 
that you keep your customs there ; but on the introduction of 
a little one to the bosom of the church, or restoring the body 
of a saint to Him who made it of the dust, nothing can be 
more repulsive to right religious feelings than to be bothered 
by a fee-seeking clerk, thrusting in your face an itching palm : 
to the poor, these things are more than a mere annoyance ; 



160 ANTI-XURION; 

they amount to a hardship and a hindrance ; for such de- 
mands at such seasons are often nothing less than a bitter 
extortion upon the self-denial of conscientious duty. 

More might be added ; but enough, too much has been 
alluded to. Nothing would strengthen the bulwarks of our 
Zion more than such easy reforms as these : recent happy 
revivals in our church would thus be more solidified ; and 
where, as now, many have been lulled to slumber, many 
grieved, many become disgusted or Dissenters, our sons and 
our daughters would grow up as the polished corners of the 
temple, and crowds would throng the courts of our holy and 
beautiful House. 

Suffer thus far, clerical and lay, these crude hints: in all 
things have I studied brevity throughout this little bookful ; 
therefore are you spared a perusal of my reasons, and so be 
indulgent for their absence. I " touch your ears" but lightly ; 
be you for charity, as in old Rome, my favorable witnesses. 



My before-mentioned Censor of the press had a very con- 
siderable mind to dock all mention of the following intended 
brochure. But I answered, Really, Mr. Judgment, (Better 
or Worse, as occasion may register your Agnomen,) you 
must not weigh trifles in gold-assaying scales ; be not so par- 
ticular as to the polish of a thumb-nail; endure a little inco- 
herent pastime; count not the several stems of hay, straw, 
stubble, — but suffer them to be pitch-forked en masse, and 
unconsidered : it is their privilege in common with that of 
certain others, — lightnesses that froth upon the surface of 
society. Moreover, let me remind your worship's classicality 
that no one of mortals is sapient at all times; item, that if 
friend Flaccus be not a calumniator, even the rigid virtue of 



A CRUSADE. 161 

the antiquer Cato delighted in so stimulant a vanity as wine 
hot. So give the colt its head, and let it go : remembering 
always that this same colt,. as straying without a responsible 
rider, is indeed liable to be impounded by any who can catch 
him ; but still, if he be found to have done great damage to 
his master's character, or to a neighbor's fences, the estray 
shall rather be abandoned than acknowledged. Let then this 
unequal work, this ill-assorted bundle of dry book-plants, this 
undirected parcel of literary stuff, be accounted much in the 
same situation as that of the wanton caitiff-colt, so likely to 
bait a-pound, and afterwards to be sold for payment of ex- 
penses, in true bailiff-sense of justice. And let thus much 
serve as discursive prolegomena to a notion, scarcely worth 
recording, but for the wonder, that no professed writer (at 
least to my small knowledge) has entered on so common- 
sense a field. Paris, I remember, some years ago was inun- 
dated with copies of a treatise on the important art of tying 
the cravat; every shop-window displayed the mystic dia- 
grams, and every stiff neck proclaimed its popularity. This 
was my yesterday's-conceived precedent for entertaining the 
bright hope of illuminating London on the subject of shaving : 

ANTI-XURION, 

A CRUSADE AGAINST RAZORS. 

should have been my taking title ; and perchance the learned 
treatise might have been characteristically illustrated with 
steel cuts. Shaving is a wider topic than most people think 
for; it is a species of insanity that has afflicted man in all 
ages, and deprived him of nature's best adornment in every 
country under heaven. So contradictorily too : as thus; the 
11 



162 ANTI-XURION; 

Spanish friar shaves all but a rim round his head, which rim 
alone sundry North American aborigines determine to extir- 
pate; John Chinaman nourishes exclusively a long cue, just 
on that same inch of crown-land which the P. P. sedulously 
keeps as bare as his palm: all the Orientals shave the head, 
and cherish the beard ; all the Occidentals immolate the 
beard, and leave the honors of the head untouched. Then, 
again, the strange successive fashions in this same unnatural, 
unneedful depilation ; look at the vagaries of young France : 
not to descend also to savage men, and their clumsy shell- 
scrapings ; and to devote but little time to the voluminous 
topic of wigs, male and female, cavalier and caxon, Marl- 
borough and monstrous maccaroni, — from the plaited Absa- 
lom-looking periwig of a Pharaoh in the British Museum, to 
Truefitt's last patent self-adjuster. Of all these follies, and 
their root a razor, might we show the manifest absurdity: we 
might argue upon Eastern stupidity as caused by thickness 
of the skull, such thickness being the substitute for thatchy 
hair suggested by kind ill-used Nature as the hot brain's best 
protection : we might reason upon the average sheepishness 
of this peaceful West, as due to having shorn the lion of his 
mane, Phoebus of his glory, man of his majestic beard. Then 
the martyrdom it is to many ; who stoically, day after day, 
persist in scratching to the quick their irritable chins, and 
after all to little better end than the diligent earning of tooth- 
aches, ear-aches, colds, sore throats, and unbecoming blank 
faces. Habit, it is true, makes us deem that a comfort, and 
our better halves (or those we would fain have so) think that 
a beauty, which our forerunners of old time w 7 ould have held 
a plague, a disgrace, a deformity, a mortification : prisoned 
paupers in the Union think it an insufferable hardship to go 
bearded, and King David's ambassadors would have given 



A CRUSADE. 163 

their right eyes not to have been shaved; so much are we 
the slaves of custom : Sheffield also, it is equally true, is a 
town that humane men would not wish to ruin; by razors 
they of Sheffield live, and shaving is their substance. But, 
as in the case of the smoother and softer sex, we are con- 
vinced that the wand of fashion would presently convert their 
heterodox antibarbal prejudices; so, in the case of harder- 
ware Sheffield, while we hope to live to see razors regarded 
as antiquarian rarities, (even as a watchman's rattle, or the 
many-caped coats of the semi-extinct class Welleria coach- 
manensis are now some time become,) still we desire all 
possible multiplication to the tribe of trimming scissors. 
Like Ireland, we shout for long denied justice; give us our 
beards. That reasonable indulgence shall never be abused ; 
our Catholic emancipation of moustache and imperial, whisker 
and the rest, shall not be a pretence for lions' manes, or the 
fringe of goats and monkeys : we would not so far follow 
unsophisticated nature as to relapse into barbarous wild men; 
but diligently squaring, pointing, combing, and perfuming 
those natural manly decorations, after the most approved 
modes of Raleigh, Walsingham, and Shakspeare, and hero- 
ical Edward the Black Prince, and venerable apostolic Bede, 
we will encroach little further than to discard our comfortless 
starched collars and strangling stocks to adopt once more in 
lieu thereof open necks and vandyke borders. 

Of course, (here, priestlike, we take our ell,) there must 
follow upon this a grand and glorious revolution in male 
attire. This present close-fitting, undignified set of habili- 
ments, which no chisel dare imitate, — this cumbersome, un- 
becoming garb might, should, ought to be, and would be, 
superseded by slashed gay jerkins, and picturesque nether 
garments: cap and feather throwing into shade the modern 



164 ANTI-XURION. 

hat, ugliest of all imaginable head-dresses ; and in lieu of 
the smock-frock Macintosh, or coarse-featured bear-skin, 
Ciceronian mantles flowing from the shoulders, or lighter 
capes of the elegant olden-time Venetian. By way of dis- 
tinguishing the now confused classes of society, my radical 
reform in dress would go to recommend that nobles and 
gentry wear their own heraldic colors and livery buttons; 
and humbler domesticated creatures walk, as modest gentle- 
folks do now, in what sundry have presumed to call " Mufti." 
To be briefer ; in dress, if nothing more, let us sensibly re- 
trograde to the days of good Queen Bess: I will not say, 
copy a Sir Piercie Shafton, who boasts of having " danced 
the salvage man at the mummery of Clerkenwell, in a suit 
of flesh-colored silk, trimmed with fur;" neither, under these 
dingy skies, would I care to walk abroad with Sir Philip 
Sydney in satin boots, or with Oliver Goldsmith in a peach- 
colored doublet: but still, for very comfort's sake, let us 
break our bonds of cloth and buckram ; and, in so far as 
adornment is concerned, let us exchange this staid funeral 
monotony for the gallant garb of our ancestors, the brave 
costumes of our Edwards and the bluff King Hal. 

Behold, too scornful friend, how my Tory rabies reaches 
to the wardrobe. The modern dress of illuminated Europe 
has, in my humble opinion, gone far to weaken the old em- 
pire of the Porte, to denationalize Egypt, to degenerate the 
Jews, to mammonize once generous Greece, and carry re- 
publican equality into the great prairies of America : it is the 
undistinguishing, humiliating, unchivalrous livery of our cold 
cosmopolites. But enough of this; pews and spires are to 
my Quixotism not more unextinguishable foes, than coats, 
cravats, waistcoats, and unnameables. 

And now an honest word at parting, about such trivialities 



THE SQUIRE. 165 

of authorship. Why should a poor shepherd of the Landes 
for ever wear his stilts? Or a tragic actor, like some mor- 
tified La Trappist, never be allowed to laugh ? Or Mr. Green 
be denied any other carriage than the wicker car of his bal- 
loon ? Even so, dear reader, prithee suffer a serious sort of 
author sometimes to take off his wig and spectacles, and con- 
descend to think of such minor matters as the toilet and its 
still-recurring duties. And, if you should find out the veri- 
table name of your weak confessing scribe, think not. the less 
kindly of his graver volumes; this one is his pastime, his 
holiday-laugh, his purposely truant, lawless, desultory recre- 
ance : impute not folly to the face of cheerfulness ; be chari- 
table to such mixtures of alternate gayety and soberness as in 
thine own mind, if thou searchest, thou shalt find; let me 
laugh with those that laugh, as well as sympathize with 
weepers; and cavil not at those inconsistencies, which of a 
verity are man's right attributes. 



Ideas lie round about us, thick as daisies in a summer mea- 
dow. For my own part, I know not what a walk, or a talk, 
or a peep into a book may lead me to. Brunei hit upon the 
notion of a tunnel-shield, from the casual sight of a certain 
water-beetle, to whom the God of Nature had given a pro- 
tecting buckler for its head. Newton found out gravitation, 
by reasoning on the fall of an apple from the tree. Almost 
every invention has been the suggestion of an accident. 
Even so, to descend from great things, to small, did a soli- 
tary stroll in most-English Devonshire hint to me the next 
fair topic. It was while wandering about the Pyrenean 
neighborhood of Linton and Ly'mouth not many months ago, 
that my reveries became concentrated for divers hallucinating 



166 THE SQUIRE, 

hours on a very pretty book, with a very pretty title. And 
here let me remark episodically, that I pride myself on titles; 
what compositors call " monkeyfying the title-page" is known 
to be a talent of itself, and one moreover to which in these 
days of advertisements and superficialities many a meagre 
book has owed its popular acceptance. The titles of gene- 
rations back seemed not to have been regarded honest, if 
they did not exhibit on their face a true and particular table 
of contents; whereas in these sad times, (with many, not 
with me,) mystery is a good rule, but falsehood is a better. 
Again, those honest-speaking authors of the past scrupled 
not to designate their writings as " A most erudite treatise" 
on so-and-so, or a " A right ingenious handling of the mys- 
teries" of such-and-such, whereas modern hypocrisy aims at 
under-rating its own pet work ; and more than one book has 
been ruined in the market, for having been carelessly titled 
by a definite the; as if, forsooth, it were the w T orld's arbiter 
of that one topic, self-constituted pundit of, e. g., Title-pages. 
And this word brings me back: consider the truly English 
music of this one : 

THE SQUIRE, 

AND HIS BEAUTIFUL HOME, 

a fine old country gentleman, pleasantly located, affluent, 
noble-minded, w T ise, and patriotic. This was to have been 
shown forth, in wish at least, as somewhat akin to, or con- 
generous with, " The Doctor, &c." — that rambling wonder 
of strange and multifarious reading; or "The Rectory of 
Valehead," or " Vicar of Wakefield," or " The Family Ro- 
binson Crusoe," still unwrecked ; or many another hearty, 



AND HIS BEAUTIFUL HOME. 167 

cheerful, or pathetic tale of home, sweet home : and yet as 
to design and execution strictly original and unplagiaristic. 
The first chapters (simple healthy writing, redolent of green 
pastures, and lichened rocks, and dew-dropt mountains,) 
might introduce localities ; the beautiful home itself, an 
Elizabethan mansion, with its park, lake, hill, and valley 
scenery; a peep at the blue mile-ofT sea, brawling brooks, 
oak-woods, conservatories, rookery, and all such pleasant 
adjuncts of that most fortunate of pleasure-hunters, a country- 
Squire with a princely rent-roll. Then should be detailed, 
circumstantially, the lord of the beautiful home, a picture of 
the hospitable virtues; the wife of the beautiful home, a 
portraiture of happy domesticity, admirable also as a mother, 
a nurse, a neighbor, and the poor's best friend : children must 
abound, of course, or the home is a heaven uninhabited ; and 
shrewd hints might hereabouts be dropped as to the judicious 
or injudicious in matters educational: servants, too, both old 
and young, with discussions on their modern treatment, and 
on that better class of bygones, whom kindness made not 
familiar, and the right assertion of authority provoked not 
into insolence ; whose interest for the dear old family was 
never merged in their own, and whose honesty was as un- 
suspected as that of young master himself, or sweet little 
mistress Alice. 

After all this, might we descant upon the Squire's charac- 
teristics. Take him as a politician ; liberal, that is to say, 
(for his frown is on me at a phrase so doubtful,) generous, 
tolerant, kind, and manly; but none of your low-bred slan- 
derers of that noble name, so generally tyrants at home and 
cowardly abroad, mean agitating fellows, the scum of dis- 
gorging society, raised by turbulence and recklessness from 
the bottom to the surface: oh no, none of these, but, for all 



168 THE SQUIRE, 

his just liberality, an honest, honorable, loyal, church-going, 
uncompromising Tory: with a detail of his reasons, notions, 
and practices thereabouts, inclusive of his conduct at elec- 
tions, his wholesome influence over an otherwise unguided 
or ill-guided tenantry, and as concerning other miscalled 
corruptions: his open argumentation of the Representative 
doctrine, that it ought to stop short as soon as ever the reli- 
gion, the learning, and the w T ealth of a country are fairly re- 
presented ; that in fact the poor man thinks little of his vote, 
unless indeed in worse cases looking for a bribe ; and that 
the principle is pushed into ruinous absurdities when the 
destitution, the crime, and the ignorance of a nation demand 
their proper representatives ; that, almost as a consequence 
of human average depravity, the greater the franchise's ex- 
tension, the worse in all ways become those who impersonate 
the enfranchised; and so, after due condemnation of Whig- 
gery, to stultify Chartism, and that demoralizing lie, the bal- 
lot. Then as to the Squire's religion ; and certain confabu- 
lations with his parson, his household, his harvest-home 
tenantry, and local preachers of dissent and schism ; his 
creed, practice, and favorable samples of daily life. More- 
over, our Squire should have somewhat to tell of personal 
history and adventures ; a youth of poor dependence on a 
miser uncle; a storm-tost early manhood, consequent on 
his high uncompromising principles ; then the miser's death, 
without the base injustice of that cruel will, which an 
eleventh-hour penitence destroyed : the Squire comes to his 
property, marries his one old flame, effects reformations, 
attains popularity, happiness, and other due prosperities. 
Anecdotes of particular passages, as in affliction or in joy ; 
his son lamed for life, or his house half burnt down, his 
attack by highwaymen, or election for Parliament. The 



AND HIS BEAUTIFUL HOME. 169 

Squire's general confidence in man, sympathy with frailties, 
and success in regenerating long-lost characters. His dis- 
course on field-sports, displaying the amiable intellectuality 
of a Gilbert White as opposed to the blood-thirsty Nimrodism 
and Ramrodism of a mad Mytton. A marriage ; a funeral ; 
a disputed legacy of some eccentric relative ; with its agree- 
able concomitants of heartless selfish strife, rebuked by the 
Squire's noble example: the conventicle gently put down by 
dint of gradual desertions, and church-going as tenderly 
extended ; vestry demagogues and parochial incendiaries 
chastised by our Squire ; and divers other adventures, con- 
versations, situations, and conditions, illustrative of that 
grand character, a fine old English gentleman, all of the 
olden time. 

Altogether, if well managed, a book like this would be 
calculated to do substantial good in these days of no princi- 
ple or bad principle. A captivating example well applied, 
— witness the uses of biography, — is infectious among the 
well-inclined and well-informed. But, but, but, — I fancy 
there may exist, and do exist already, admirable books of 
just this character. I have heard of, but not seen, "The 
Portrait of a Christian Gentleman," and another " of a 
Churchman:" doubtless, these, combined with a sort of Mr. 
Dovedale in that clever impossible u Floreston," or an equally 
unnatural and charming Sir Charles Grandison, with a dash 
of scenery and a sprinkle of anecdote, would make up, far 
better than I could fabricate, the fair fine character that once 
I thought to sketch. Moreover, to a plain gentleman living 
in the country, of perfectly identical ideas with those of the 
Squire on all imaginable topics, gifted too (we will not say 
with quite his princely rent-roll, but at any rate) w T ith sundry 
like advantages in the way of decent affluence, pleasant 



170 THE AUTHOR'S TRIBUNAL; 

scenery, an old house, a good wife, and fair children, — with 
plenty of similar adventures and circumstantials, — and the 
necessary proportion of highwaymen, radicals, rascals, and 
schismatics dotted all about his neighborhood, the idea would 
seem, to say the least, somewhat egotistic. But why may 
not humble individualities be generalized in grander shapes? 
why not glorify the picture of a cottage with coloring of 
Turner's most imaginative palette ? An author, like an artist, 
seldom does his work well, unless he has nature before him : 
exalted and idealized, the Roman beggar goes forth a Jupiter, 
and country wenches help a Howard to his Naiads. Never- 
theless, let the Squire and his train pass us by, indefinite as 
Banquo's progeny: let his beautiful home be sublimely indis- 
tinct; even such are Martin's aetherial cities: the thought 
shall rest unfructified at present, — a mummied, vital seed. 
The review is over, and the Squire's troop of yeomanry not 
required : so let them wait till next year's muster. 



Few novelties are more called for, in this halcyon age of 
authorship, this summer season for the Sosii, this every-day- 
a-birthday for some five-and-twenty books, than the estab- 
lishment of a recognized literary tribunal, some judgment- 
hall of master spirits, from whose calm, unhurried, unbiased 
verdict there should be no appeal. Far, very far be it from 
me to arraign modern reviewers either of partialities or inca- 
pacity; indeed, it is probable that few men of high talent, 
character and station have not, at some time or other, tem- 
porarily at least contributed to swell their ranks : moreover, 
from one whom they have treated so magnanimously they 
shall not get the wages of ingratitude; they have been kind 
to my dear book-children, and I — donH be so curious — thank 



AN ORATION. 171 

them for their courtesy with all a father's feeling toward the 
liberal friends of his sons and daughters. Speaking gene- 
rally, (for, not to flatter any class of men, truly there are 
rogues in all,) I am bold to call them candid, honest, clever 
men; quite superior, as a body, to everything like bribery 
and corruption, and with human limitations, little influenced 
by motives either of prejudice or favor. For indefatigable 
industry, unexampled patience, and powers of mind very far 
above what are commonly attributed to them, I, for my 
humble judgment, would give our periodical journalists their 
honorable due : I am playing no Aberdeenshire game of mu- 
tual scratching; I am too hardened now in the ways of print 
to be much more than indifferent as to common praise or 
censure ; that honeymoon is over with me, when a laudatory 
article in some kindly magazine sent a thrill from eye to 
heart, from heart to shoe-sole understanding: I no longer 
feel rancorous with inveterate wrath against a poor editor 
whose faint praise, impotent to d — , has yet abundant force 
to induce a hearty return of the compliment : like some case- 
hardened rock, so little while ago but soft young coral, the 
surges may lash me, but leave no mark, the sun may shine, 
but cannot melt me. Argal, as the clown says, is my verdict 
honest : and further now to prove it so, shall come the limi- 
tations. 

With all my gratitude and right good feeling to our diurnal 
and hebdomadal amusers and instructors, I cannot but con- 
sider that gazette and newspaper reviewers are insufficient 
and unsatisfactory judges of literature, if not indeed some- 
times erring guides to the public taste; the main cause of 
this consisting in the essential rapidity of their composition. 
There is not — from the multiplicity of business to be got 
through, there cannot be — adequate time allowed for any- 



172 THE AUTHOR'S TRIBUNAL ; 

thing like justice to the claims of each author. Periodicals 
that appear at longer intervals are in all reason more or less 
excepted from this objection ; but by the daily and weekly 
majority the labors of a lifetime are cursorily glanced at, 
hastily judged from some isolated passage, summarily found 
laudable or guilty; and this weak opinion, strongly enough 
expressed as some compensation in solid superstructure for 
the sandiness of its foundations, is circulated by thousands 
over all the corners of the habitable world. To say that the 
public (those so-called reviewers of reviews, but wiser to be 
looked on only as perusers), balance all such false verdicts, 
might indeed be true in the long run, but unfortunately it is 
not: for first, no run at all, far less a long one, is permitted 
to the persecuted production ; and next, it is notorious, that 
people think very much as they are told to think. Now, I 
have already stated at too much length that I have no per- 
sonalities to complain of, no self-interests to serve : for the 
past I have been well entreated; and for the future, suppos- 
ing such an unlikelihood as more hypothetical books, I am 
hard, bold, sanguine, stoical ; while, as for the present, though 
I refuse not my gauntlet to any man, my visor shall be raised 
by none. But I enter the lists for others, my kinsmen in 
composing. Authors, to speak it generally, are an ill-used 
race, because judged hastily, often superciliously, for evil or 
for good. It is impossible for the poor public, (who, besides 
having to earn daily bread, have to wade through all the 
daily papers,) from mere lack of hours in the day to enter- 
tain any opinions of their own about a book or books: the 
money to buy them is one objection, the time to read them 
another; to say less of the capacity, the patience, and the 
will. Without question, they are guided by their teachers; 
and the grand fault of these is, their everlasting hurry. 



AN ORATION. 173 

At another necessary failing of reviewers I would only 
delicately hint. The royal We is very imposing : for example, 
the king of magazines, No. 134, (need I name it?) informs 
us, p. 373, " We happen to have now in wear a good long 
cloak of imperial gray," &c. ; and some fifteen lines lower 
down, " We are now mending our pen with a small knife," 
and so forth : now all this grandiloquence serves to conceal 
the individual ; and to reduce my other great objection to a 
single letter, let us only recollect that this powerful, this des- 
potic We, is being interpreted, nothing but an I by itself, 
a simple scribe, a single and plebeian number one. A mere 
unit, an anonymous, irresponsible unit, dissects in a quarter 
of an hour the grand result of some ten years ; and this mo- 
mentary influence on one man's mind, (perhaps wearied, or 
piqued, or biased, or haply unskilled in the point at issue, 
but at all events inevitably in a hurry to jump at a conclu- 
sion,) this light accidental impression is sounded forth to the 
ends of the earth, and leads public opinion in a verdict of 
thunder. And as for yon impertinent parenthesis, — or perti- 
nent as some will say, — give me grace thus blandly to sug- 
gest a possibility. The mighty editorial We, upon whose 
authoritative tones the world's opinion will probably be 
pivoted, — whose pen by casual ridicule or as casual admira- 
tion makes or mars the fortune of some painstaking literary 
laborer, — whose dictum carelessly dispenses local honor or 
disgrace, and has before now by sharp sarcasms, speaking 
daggers though using none, even killed more than one over- 
sensitive Keats, — this monarchic We is but a frail mortal, 
liable at least to "some of the imperfections of our common 
nature, gentlemen," as, for example, to be morose, impatient, 
splenetic, and the more if over-worked. Neither should I 
waive in this place, in this my rostrum of blunt, plain speech, 



174 THE AUTHOR'S TRIBUNAL 



the many censurable cases, unhappily too well authenticated, 
where personal enmity has envenomed the reviewing pen 
against a writer, and stabs in the dark have wounded good 
men's fame. Neither, again, those other instances, where 
reviewers, not being omniscient, — (yet is their knowledge 
most various and brilliant,) — having been from want of spe- 
cific information incompetent to judge of the matters in ques- 
tion, have striven to shroud their ignorance of the greater topic 
in clamorous attacks of its minor incidents ; burrowing into a 
mound, if they cannot force a breach through the rampart; 
and mystifying things so cleverly with doubts, that we can- 
not see the blessed sun himself for very fog. 

Now really, good folk, all this should be amended : would 
that the we were actually plural ; would that we had a well- 
selected bench of literary judges ; would that some higher 
sort of Stationers' Hall or Athenaeum were erected into an 
acknowledged tribunal of an author's merits or demerits; 
would that, to wish the very least, the w T holesome practice of 
a well-considered imprimatur were revived! Let famous 
men, whose reputation is firm-fixed, our Wordsworths, Hal- 
lams, Campbells, Crolys, Wilsons, Bulwers, and the like, 
decide in the case of at least all who desire such decision. 
I suppose, as no one in these selfish times will take trouble 
without pay, that either the judges should be numbered 
among state pensioners, or that each work so calmly exam- 
ined must produce its regular fee : but these are after-con- 
siderations ; and be sure no writer will grudge a guinea for 
calm, unbought, unsuspected justice bestowed upon his brain- 
child. Let all those members of the tribunal, deciding by 
ballot, — (here, in an assembly where all are good, great, and 
honest, I shrink not from that word of evil omen,) — judge, 
as far as possible, together and not separately, of all the kinds 



AN ORATION. 175 

of literature : I would not have poets sentencing all the po- 
etry, historians all the history, novelists all the novels, and 
theologists all the works upon religion, — for humanity is at 
the best infirm, and motives little searchable; but let all 
judge equally in a sort of open court. The machinery might 
be difficult, and I cannot show its working in so slight an 
essay ; but surely it is a strange thing in civilization, and a 
stranger when we consider what literature does for us, bless- 
ing our world or banning it, — it is a wonder and a shame 
that books of whatever tendency are so cast forth upon the 
waters to sink or swim at hazard. I acknowledge, friend, 
your present muttering, Utopian ! Arcadian! Formosan! to 
be not ill-founded: the sketch is a hasty one; but though it 
may have somewhat in common with the vagaries of Sir 
Thomas More, Sir Philip Sydney, and that king in impu- 
dence, George Psalmanazar, still I stand upon this ground, 
that many an ill-used author wants protection, and that so- 
ciety, for its own sake as well as his, ought to supply a court 
for literary reputation. Some poor man the other day, and in 
a reputable journal too, had five new-born tragedies strangled 
and mangled in as many lines: we need not suppose him a 
Shakspeare, but he might have been one for aught of evi- 
dence given to the contrary ; at any rate, five at once, five mor- 
tal tragedies, (so puppy-fashion born and drowned,) must, 
however carelessly executed, have been the offspring of no 
common mind. Again, how often is not a laborious histo- 
riographer, particularly if of contrary politics, dismissed with 
immediate contempt, because, perchance, in his three full 
volumes, he has admitted two false dates, or haply mistakes 
the christened name of some Spanish admiral! Once more: 
how continually are not critical judgments falsified by the 
very extracts on which they rest ; how often the pet passage 



176 THE AUTHOR'S TRIBUNAL ; 

of one review is the stock butt of another! Here you will 
say is cure and malady together, like viper's fat and fang: I 
trow not; mainly because not one man in a thousand takes 
the trouble to judge for himself. But it is needless to enu- 
merate such instances; every man's conscience or his me- 
mory will supply examples wholesale : therefore, maltreated 
authors, bear witness to your own wrongs : jealously regarded 
by a struggling brotherhood, cruelly baited by self-constituted 
critics, the rejected of publishers, the victimized by book- 
sellers, the garbled in statement, misinterpreted in meaning, 
suspected of friends, persecuted by foes, — " that mine 
enemy would write a book!" It is to put a neck into a 
noose, to lie quietly in the grove of Dr. Guillot's humane 
prescription ; or, if not quite so tragical as this, it is at least 
to sit voluntarily in the stocks with Sir Hudibras, and dare 
the world's contempt; while fashionable — or unfashionable 
idiots, who are scarcely capable of a grammatical answer to 
a dinner invitation, — (those formidably confounded hes and 
hims !) — think themselves privileged to join some inane laugh 
against a clever but not yet famous author, because, forsooth, 
one character in his novel may be an old acquaintance, or 
one epithet in a long poem may be weak, indelicate, taste- 
less, or foolish, or one philosophical fact in an essay is mis- 
stated, or one statistical conclusion seems to be exaggerated. 
It is perfectly paltry to behold stupid fellows, whose intellects 
against your most ordinary scribe vary from a rushlight to a 
44 long four," as compared with a roasting roaring kitchen- 
fire, affecting contemptuously to look down upon some un- 
justly neglected or mercilessly castigated laborer in the brick- 
fields of literature, for not being — can he help it ? — a first-rate 
author, or because one reviewer in seven thinks he might 
have done his subject better justice. Take ray word for it, 



AN ORATION. 177 

— if indeed I can be a fair witness, — the man who has writ- 
ten a book is above the unwriting average, and as such 
should be ranked mentally above them : no light research, 
and tact, and industry, and head-and-hand labor, are suffi- 
cient for a volume ; even certain stolid performances in print 
do not shake my judgment ; for arrant blockheads as sundry 
authors undoubtedly are, the average (mark, not all men, but 
the average) unwriting man is an author's intellectual infe- 
rior. All men, however well capable, have not perchance 
the appetite, nor the industry, nor the opportunity to fabricate 
a volume ; nor, supposing these requisites, the moral courage 
(for moral courage, if not physical, must form part of an 
Author's mind,) to publish the lucubration: but U I magnify 
mine office" above the unnumbered host of unwriting, unin- 
formed, loose, unlettered gentry, who (as full of leisure as a 
cabbage, and as overflowing with redundant impudence as 
any Radical mob,) mainly tend to form by their masses the 
average penless animal-man, w r ho could not hold a candle to 
any the most mediocre of the Marsyas-used authors of haply 
this week's journals. Spare them, victorious Apollos, spare: 
if libels that diminish wealth be punishable, is there no moral 
guilt in those legalized libels that do their utmost to destroy 
a character for wisdom, wit, learning, industry, and inven- 
tion? — Critical flayer, try thou to write a book ; learn expe- 
rimentally how difficult yet relieving, how nervous yet glad- 
dening, how ungracious yet very sweet, how T worldly-foolish 
yet most wise, how conversant with scorn yet how noble and 
ennobling an attribute of Man is — Authorship. 

All this rhetoric, impatient friend, — and be a friend still, 

whether writer, reviewer, or unauthorial, — serves at my most 

expeditious pace, opposing notions considered, to introduce 

what is (till to-morrow, or perhaps the next coming minute, 

12 



178 EPILOGUE 

but at any rate for this flitting instant of time,) my last notion 
of possible but not probable authorship : a rhodomontade ora- 
tion, rather than an essay, after my own desultory and yet 
determinate fashion, to have been entituled — (so is it spelled 
by act of parliament, and therefore let us in charity hope 
rightly,) to have been entituled then, 

THE AUTHOR'S TRIBUNAL ; 

A COURT OF APPEAL AGAINST AMATEUR AND CONNOISSEUR 

CRITICISMS : 

and (the present being the next minute whereof I spake 
above) there has just hopped into my mind another taking 
title, which I generously present to any smarting scribe who 
may meditate a prose version of English Bards and Scotch 
Reviewers, videlicet 

ZOILOMASTRIX. 



At length then have I liberty to yawn, — a freedom whereof 
doubtless my readers have long been liverymen : I have 
written myself and my inkstand dry as Rosamond's pond ; 
my brain is relieved, recreated, emptied ; I go no longer 
heavily, as one that mourneth; and with gleeful face can I 
assure you that your Author's mind is once again as light as 
his heart: but when crowding fancies come thick upon it, 
they bow it, and break it, and weary it, as clouds of pigeons 
settling gregariously on a Transatlantic forest; and when 
those thronging thoughts are comfortably fixed on paper, one 



A CONCLUSION. 179 

feels, as an apple-tree may be supposed to feel, all the dif- 
ference between the heavy down-dragging crop of autumn 
and the winged aerial blossom of sweet springtide. An 
involuntary author, just eased for the time of ever-exacting 
and accumulating notions, can sympathize with holiday- 
making Atlas, chuckling over a chance so lucky as the trans- 
fer of his pack to Hercules; and can comprehend the relief 
it must have been to that foolish sage in Rasselas, when 
assured that he no longer was afflicted with the care of 
governing a galaxy of worlds. 

Some people are born to talk, with an incessant tongue 
illustrating perpetuity of motion in the much-abused mouth ; 
some to indite solid continuous prose, with a labor-loving pen 
ever tenanting the hand; but I clearly w T as born a zoological 
anomaly, with a pen in my mouth, a sort of serpent-tongue, 
Heaven give it wisdom, and put away its poison! 

Such being my character from birth, a paper-gossip, a 
writer from the cradle, I ought not demurely to apologize for 
nature's handicraft, nor excuse this light affliction of chatter- 
ing in print. — Who asks you to read it ? — Neither let me cast 
reflections on your temper or your intellect by too humble 
exculpation of this book of many themes: or must I then 
regard you as those sullen children in the market-place, 
whom piping cannot please, and sorrow cannot soften? 

And now, friend, I've done. Require not, however shrewd 
your guess, my acknowledgment of this brain-child; forgive 
all unintended harms ; supply what is lacking in my chari- 
ties ; politically, socially, authorially, think that I bigotize in 
theoretic fun, but am incarnate Tolerance for practical earnest. 
And so, giving your character fairer credit than if I feared 
you as one of those captious cautious people who make a 
man offender for an ill-considered w T ord ; commending to the 



180 EPILOGUE; A CONCLUSION. 

cordial warmth of Humanity my unhatched score and more 
of book-eggs, to perfect which I need an Eccaleobion of lite- 
rature ; and scorning, as heartily as any Sioux chief, to pro- 
long palaver, when I have nothing more to say ; suffer me 
thus courteously to take of you my leave. And forasmuch as 
Lord Chesterfield recommends an exit to be heralded by a 
pungent speech, let me steal from quaint old Norris the last 
word wherewith I trouble you — " These are my thoughts ; I 
might have spun them out into a greater length, but that I 
think a little plot of ground, thick-sown, is better than a 
great field, which for the most part of it lieth fallow." 



APPENDIX 



AN 



AFTER-THOUGHT 



It will be quite in keeping with your Author's mind, and 
consistently characteristic of his desultory indoles — (not in- 
dolence, pray you, good Anglican, albeit thereunto akin,) — 
if, after having thus formally taken his conge with the help 
of a Petronius so redoubtable as Chesterfield, he just steps 
back again to induce you to have another last ramble. Now, 
the wherefore of this might sentimentally be veiled, where I 
but little honest, in professed attachment for my amiable 
reader, as though with Romeo I cried, " Parting in such 
sweet sorrrow, that I could say farewell till it be morrow;" 
or it might be extenuated cacoethically, as though a new crop 
of fancies were sprung up already, an after-math rank and 
wild, before the gladdening shower of commendation has 
yet freshened-up my brown hay-field ; or it might be dis- 
guised falsely, as if a parcel of precious MSS. had been lost 
by penny-postage, or stolen in the purlieus of Shoe-lane : but, 
instead of all these unworthy subterfuges, the truth shall be 
told plainly; we are yet too short by a sheet (so hints our 
publishing Procrustes) of the marketable volume. Accord- 
ingly, whether or not in this booklet your readership has 



182 APPENDIX. 

already found seed sufficient for Cyclopaedias, I am free 
to admit that the expectant butterman at least has not his 
legitimate post-octavo allowance of three hundred pages; 
and to fill this aching void as cleverly and quickly as I can, 
is my first object in so rapid a return. That honesty is the 
best policy, deny who dare? 

Still it is competent for me to confess worthier objects, 
(although, in point of their arising, they were secondary,) as 
further illustrative of my " Author's mind" shown in other 
specimens; for example, a linsey-woolsey tapestry of many 
colors shall be hung upon the end of this arcade; the last 
few trees in this poor avenue shall bear the flowers of poetry 
as well as the fruit of prose; my swan (0 dub it not a goose) 
would like a prima-donna, go off this theatre of fancy, sing- 
ing. And again, suffer me, good friend, to think your charity 
still willing to be pleased: many weary pages back, I offered 
you to part with me in peace, if you felt small sympathies 
with a rambler so whimsical and lawless; surely, having 
walked together kindly until now, we shall not quarrel at the 
last. 

Empty however, empty, and rejoicing in its unthonghtful 
emptiness, have I boasted this my head but a page or two 
ago; and that boast, for all the critic's sneer, that no one will 
deny it, shall not be taken from me by renewal of determined 
meditations: now that my house is swept and garnished, I 
would not beckon back those old inhabitants. Neither let 
me heed so lightly of your intellect, as to hope to satisfy its 
reading with the scanty harvest of a soil effete; this license 
of writing up to measure shall not show me sterile, any more 
than that emancipation shall, by indulgence of thought, be 
disenchanted. And now to solve the problem: not to think, 
for my mind is in a regimen of truancy; not to fail in pleas- 



AN AFTER-THOUGHT. 183 

ing, if it be possible, the great world's implacable palate, 
therefore to eschew dilation of good liquor; and yet to ren- 
der up in fair array the fitting tale of pages : well, if I may 
not metaphysically draw upon internal resources, I can at 
least externally and physically resort to yonder — desk; 
(drawer would have savored of the Punic, which Scipio and 
I blot out with equal hate;) for therein lie perdus divers po- 
eticalsl fain would see in print ; yea, start not at "poeticals," 
carp not at the threatening sound, for verily even as carp, (so 
called from carpere, to catch, if you can, and the Saxon capp, 
to cavil, because when caught they don't pay for mastication,) 
even as carp, a muddy fish, difficult to hook, and provocate 
of hostile criticism, conceals its lack of savor in the flavor of 
port-wine, — even so shall strong prose-sauce be served up 
with my poor dozen of sonnets: and ye who would uncha- 
ritably breathe that they taste stronger of Lethe's mud than 
of Helicon's sweet water, treat me to a better dish, or carp 
not at my fishing. 

Imagination, as I need not tell psychologists by this time, 
is my tyrant; I cannot sleep, nor sit out a sermon, nor remem- 
ber yesterday, nor read in peace (how calm in blessed quiet 
people seem to read!) without the distraction of a thousand 
fancies: I hold this an infirmity, not an accomplishment; 
a thing to be conquered, not to be coveted: and still I love 
it, suffering those chains of gossamer to wind about me, that 
seductive honey-jar yet again to trap me, like some poor 
insect; thus then my foolish idolatry heretofore hath hailed 



184 APPENDIX. 



IMAGINATION, 



My fond first love, sweet mistress of my mind, 
Thy beautiful sublimity hath long 
Charm'd mine affections, and entranced my song, 
Thou Spirit-Queen, that sit'st enthroned, enshrined 
Within this suppliant heart; by day and night 
My brain is full of thee : ages of dreams, — 
Thoughts of a thousand worlds in visions bright, — 

Fear's dim terrific train, — Guilt's midnight schemes,- 
Strange peeping eyes, — soft smiling fairy faces, — 
Dark consciousness of fallen angels nigh, — 
Sad converse with the dead, — or headlong races 
Down the straight cliffs, — or clinging on a shelf 

Of brittle shale, — or hunted through the sky! — 
God of mind, I shudder at myself! 



Now, friend reader, you have accustomed yourself to think 
that everything in rhyme, i.e., poetry, as you somewhat scorn- 
fully call it, must be false : and I am sorry to be obliged to 
grant you that a leaning towards plain matter-of-fact, is no- 
wise characteristic of metrical enthusiasts. But believe me 
for a truth-teller : that sonnet (did you read it ?) hints at some 
fearful verities ; and that you may further apprehend this sweet 
ideal mistress of your Author's mind, suffer me to introduce 
to your acquaintance 



AN AFTER-THOUGHT. 185 



IMAGINATION PERSONIFIED. 

Dread Monarch-maid, I see thee now before me 
Searching my soul with those mysterious eyes, 

Spell-bound I stand, thy presence stealing o'er me, 
While all unnerved my trembling spirit dies: 
Oh, what a world of untold wonder lies 

Within thy silent lips ; how rare a light 
Of conquer'd joys and ecstasies represt 
Beneath thy dimpled cheek shines half-confest ; 

In what luxuriant masses, glossy-bright, 

Those raven locks fall shadowing thy fair breast! 

And lo, that bursting brow, with gorgeous wings, 
And vague young forms of beauty coyly hiding 
In thy crisp curls, like cherubs there abiding, — 

Charmer, to thee my heart enamor'd springs. 

Such, then, and of me so well beloved, is that abstracted 
Platonism. But verily the fear of imagination would far 
outbalance any love of it, if crime had peopled for a man 
that viewless world with spectres, and the Medusa-head of 
Justice were shaking her snakes in his face. And, by way 
of a parergon observation, how terrible, most terrible, to the 
guilty soul must be the solitary silent system now so popular 
among those cold legislative schemers, who have ground the 
poor man to starvation, and would hunt the criminal to mad- 
ness ! How false is that political philosophy which seeks to 
reform character by leaving conscience caged up in loneliness 
for months to gnaw into its diseased self, rather than sur- 
rounding it with the wholesome counsels of better-living 
minds. It is not often good for man to be alone: and yet in 



186 APPENDIX. 

its true season, (parsimoniously used, not prodigally abused,) 
solitude does fair service, rendering also to the comparatively 
innocent mind precious pleasures: religion presupposed, and 
a judgment strong enough of muscle to rein-in the coursers 
of Imagination's car, I judge it good advice to prescribe for 
most men an occasional course of 

SOLITUDE. 

Therefore delight thy soul in Solitude, 

Feeding on peace ; if solitude it be 
To feel that million creatures, fair and good, 

With gracious influences circle thee, — 

To hear the mind's own music, — and to see 
God's glorious world with eyes of gratitude, 

Unwatch'd by vain intruders. Let me shrink 

From crowds, and prying faces, and the noise 

Of men and merchandize ; far nobler joys 
Than chill Society's false hand hath given 
Attend me when I'm left alone to think. 

To think — alone? — ah no, not quite alone; 
Save me from that, — cast out from Earth and Heaven, 

A friendless, Godless, isolated ONE! 



But of these higher metaphysicals, these fancy-bred extra- 
vagations, perhaps somewhat too much: you will dub me 
dreamer, if not proser, — or rather, poet, as the more modern 
reproach. Let us then, by way of clearing our mind at once 
of these hallucinations, go forth quickly into the fresh green 
fields, and expatiate w T ith glad hearts on these full-blown 
glories of 



AN AFTER-THOUGHT. 187 



SUMMER, 



Warm Summer! yes, the very word is warm; 
The hum of bees is in it, and the sight 
Of sunny fountains glancing silver light, 

And the rejoicing world, and every charm 

Of happy nature in her hour of love, 

Fruits, flowers, and flies, in rainbow-glory bright: 

The smile of God glows graciously above, 
And genial earth is grateful ; day by day 
Old faces come again, with blossoms gay, 

Gemming in gladness meadow, garden, grove: 

Haste with thy harvest, then, my softened heart, 
Awake thy better hopes of better days, 
Bring in thy fruits and flowers of thanks and praise, 

And in creation's paean take thy part. 

How different in sterner beauty was the landscape not long 
since ; the energies of universal life prisoned up in temporary 
obstruction; every black hedgerow tufted with woolly snow, 
like some Egyptian mother mourning for her children ; shrubs 
and plants fettered up in glittering chains, motionless as those 
stonestruck feasters before the head of Gorgon ; and the dark- 
green fir-trees swathed in heavy curtains of iridescent white- 
ness. Contrast is ever pleasurable, therefore we need scarcely 
apologize for an ice in the dog-days, I mean for this present 
unseasonable introduction of dead 



188 APPENDIX. 



WINTER. 

As some fair statue white and hard and cold, 

Smiling in marble, rigid yet at rest, 
Or like some gentle child of beauteous mould 

Whose placid face and softly swelling breast 

Are fixed in death, and on them bear imprest 
His magic seal of peace, — so, frozen lies 

The loveliness of nature: every tree 
Stands hung with lace against the clear blue skies; 

The hills are giant w r aves of glistering snow; 
Rare northern fowl, now strangely tame to see, 

With ruffling plumage cluster on the bough, 
And tempt the murderous gun; mouse-like, the wren 

Hides in the new-cut hedge; and all things now 
Fear starving Winter more than cruel men. 



Ay, cc cruel men:" that truest epithet for monarch-man 
must be the tangent from which my Pegasus shall strike his 
hoof for the next flight. Who does not writhe while reading 
details of cruelty, and who would not rejoice to find even 
there somewhat of 

CONSOLATION ? 

Scholar of Reason, Grace, and Providence, 
Restrain thy bursting and indignant tears ; 
With tenderest might unerring Wisdom steers 

Through those mad seas the bark of Innocence. 



AN AFTER-THOUGHT. 189 



Doth thy heart burn for vengeance on the deed — 
Some barbarous deed wrought out by crue! 

On woman, or on famish'd childhood's need, 

Yea, or these fond dumb dogs, — doth thy heart bleed 
For pity, child of sensibili 

Those tears are gracious, and thy wrath most right: 
Yet patience, patience ; there is comfort still ; 

The Judge is just; a world of love and light 
Remains to counterpoise the lead of ill, 
And the poor victim's cup with angel's food to fill. 

For, as my Psycotherion has long ago informed you, I hope 
there is some sort of heaven yet in reserve for the brute crea- 
tion: if otherwise, in respect of costermongers' donkeys, 
Kamskatdales' gaunt s f arved dogs, the Guacho's horse spur- 
red deep with three-inch rowels, the angler's worm, Stras- 
burgh geese, and poor footsore curs harnessed to ill-balanced 
trucks, for all these and many more I, for one, sadly stand in 
need of consolation. Meanwhile let us change the subject. 
After a dose of cruel cogitations, and this corrupting con- 
verse with Phalaris and Domitian, what better sweetener of 
thoughts than an " olive-branch" in the waters of Marah ? 
Spend a moment in the nursery ; it is happily fashionable 
now, as well as pleasurable, to sport awhile with Nature's 
prettiest playthings; the praises of children are always at the 
tip of my — pen, that is tongue, you remember, and often have 
I told the world in all the pride of print, of my fond infantile 
predilections: then let this little Chanson be added to the 
rest ; we will call it 



190 APPENDIX. 



MARGARET, 



A song of gratitude and cheerful pray'r 

Still shall go forth my pretty babes to greet, 
As on life's firmament, serenely fair, 

Their little stars arise, with aspects sweet 
Of mild successive radiance: that small pair, 

Ellen and Mary, having gone before 
In this affection's welcome, the dear debt 
Here shall be paid to gentle Margaret: 

Be thou indeed a Pearl, — in pureness, more 
Than beauty, praise, or price ; full be thy cup, 

Mantling with grace, and truth with mercy met, 

With warm and generous charities flowing o'er; 
And when the Great King makes his jewels up, 

Shine forth, child-angel, in His coronet! 

And while hovering about this fairy-land of sweet home- 
scenery, and confessing thankfully to these domestic affec- 
tions, your Author knows one heart at least that will be glad- 
dened, one face that will be brightened by the following 

BIRTHDAY PRAYER. 

Mother, dear mother, no unmeaning rhyme, 
No mere ingenious compliment of words, 

My heart pours forth at this auspicious time: 
I know, a simple honest prayer affords 
More music on affection's thrilling chords, 

More joy than can be measured or express'd 
In song most sweet, or eloquence sublime. 



AN AFTER-THOUGHT. 191 

Mother, I bless Ihee! — God doth bless thee too! 
In these thy children's children thou art blest, 

With dear old pleasures springing up anew: 
And blessings wait upon thee still, my mother! 

Blessings to come, this many a happy year; 
For, losing thee, where could we find another 

So kind, so true, so tender, and — so dear? 

Is it an impertinence — I speak etymologically — to have 
dropped that sonnet here ? — Be it as you will, my Zoilus ; let 
me stand convicted of honesty and love : I ask no higher 
praise in this than to have pleased my mother. 



Penman as I am, have been, and shall be, innumerable 
letters have grown beneath my goose-quill. Who cannot say 
the same indeed? For in these patriotic days, for mere 
country's love and post-office prosperity, everybody writes to 
everybody about everything, or, as oftener happens, about 
nothing. Nevertheless, I wish some kind pundit would 
invent a corrosive ink, warranted to consume a letter within 
a week after it had been read and answered : then should we 
have fewer of those ephemeral documents treasured up in 
pigeon-holes, and docketed correspondence for possible pub- 
lication. Not Byron, nor Lamb, nor West, nor Gray, with 
all their epistolary charms, avail to persuade my prejudice 
that it is honest to publish a private letter : if written with 
that view, the author is a hypocrite in his friendships ; if not 
so, the decent veil of privacy is torn from social life, confi- 
dence is rebuked, betrayed, destroyed, and the suspicion of 
eaves-droppings and casual scribblings to be posthumously 
printed, makes silence truly wisdom, and grim reserve a vir- 



192 APPENDIX. 

tue. This public appetite for secret information, and if pos- 
sible for hinted scandals, this unhallowed spirit of outward 
curiosity trespassing upon the sacred precincts of a man's 
own circle, is to the real Author's mind a thing to be feared, 
if he is weak, to be circumspectly w T atched, if he is wise. Such 
is the present hunger for this kind of reading, that it w T ould 
be diffidence, not presumption, in the merest schoolboy to 
dread the future publication of his holiday letters : who 
knows, — I may jump scathless from the Monument, or in 
these Popish times become excommunicated by special bull, 
or fly round the world in a balloon, or attain to the author- 
ship of forty volumes, or be half-smothered by a valet-de- 
place, or get indicted for inveterate Toryism, or anyhow, I 
may — notwithstanding all present obscurities that intervene 
— wake one of these fine mornings, and find myself famous : 
and what then ? The odds at Tattersall's would be twelve 
to one that sundry busy-bodies, booksellers, or otherwise, 
would scrape together with malice prepense, and keep cachet 
for future print, a multitude of careless scrawls that should 
have been burnt within an hour of the reading. Now, is not 
this a thing to be exclaimed against ? and, utterly improbable 
on the ground of any merit in themselves as I should judge 
their publication (but for certain stolidities of the same sort 
that oftentimes have wearied me in print), I choose to let my 
Author's mind here enter its eternal protest against any such 
treachery regarding private 

LETTERS. 

Tear, scatter, burn, destroy, — but keep them not; 
I hate, I dread those living witnesses 



AN AFTERTHOUGHT. 

Of varying self, of good or ill forgot, 

Of altered hopes, and withered kindnesses. 
Oh, call not up those shadows of the dead, 

Those visions of the past, that idly blot 
The present with regret for blessings fled : 
This hand that wrote, this ever-teeming head, 

This flickering heart is full of chance and change; 
I would not have you watch my weaknesses, 

Nor how my foolish likings roam and range, 
Nor how the mushroom friendships of a day 
Hastened in hot-bed ripeness to decay, 

Nor how to mine own self I grow so strange. 

So anathema to editors, maranatha to publishers of all such 
hypothetical post-obits ! 



Everyone can comprehend something of an author's ease, 
when he sees his manuscript in print: it is safe; no longer 
a treasure uninsurable, no longer a locked-up care : it is 
emancipated, glorified, incapable of real extermination ; it 
has reached a changeless condition ; the chrysalis of illegi- 
ble cacography has burst its bonds, and flies living through 
the world on the wings of those true Daedali, Faust and Gu- 
temberg : the transition-state is passed ; henceforth for his 
brain-child set free from that nervous slumber, its parent 
calmly can expect the oblivion of no more than a death-like 
sleep, if he be not indeed buoyed up with the certain hope 
of immortality. " 'Tis pleasant sure to see one's self in 
print," is the adequate cause for ninety books out of a hun- 
dred ; and, though zeal might be the ostentatious stalking- 
horse, my candor shall give no better excuse for the fourteen 
13 " 



194 APPENDIX. 

lines that follow ; they require but this preface : a most vene- 
rable chapel of old time, picturesque and full of interest, is 
dropping to decay within a mile of me ; where it is, and 
whose the fault, are askings improper to be answered : never- 
theless, I cast upon the waters this meagre morsel of 

APPEAL. 

Shame on thee, Christian, cold and covetous one! 

The laws (I praise them not for this) declare 

That ancient, loved, deserted house of pray'r 
As money's worth a layman landlord's own. 

Then use it as thine own ; thy mansion there 
Beneath the shadow of this ruinous church 

Stands new and decorate ; thine every shed 
And barn is neat and proper ; I might search 

Thy comfortable farms, and well despair 

Of finding dangerous ruin overhead, 
And damp unwholesome mildew on the walls: 

Arouse thy better self, — restore it; see, 
Through thy neglect the holy fabric falls! 

Fear, lest that crushing guilt should fall on thee. 



I fear me much, poor book, this finale of jingling singing 
will jar upon the public ear; all men must shrink from a 
lengthy snake with a rattle in its tail : and this ballast a-stern 
of over-ponderous poetry may chance to swamp so frail a 
skiff. But I have promised a dozen sonnets in this after- 
thought Appendix ; yea, and I will keep that promise at all 
mortal hazards, even to the superadded unit proverbial of 
dispensing Fomarinas. Ten have been told off fairly, and 



AN AFTERTHOUGHT. 195 



now we come upon the gay court-cards. After so much of 
villainous political ferment, society returns at length to its 
every-day routine, heedful of other oratory than harangues 
from the hustings, and glad of other reading than figurative 
party-speeches. Yet am I bold to recur, just for a thought 
or two, to my whilom patriotic hopes and fears : fears indeed 
came first upon me, but hopes finally outvoted them : briefly, 
then, begin upon the worst, and endure, with what patience 
you possess, this croaky stave of bitter 

POLITICS. 

Chill'd is the patriot's hope, the poet's prayer : 
Alas, for England and her tarnish'd crown, 
Her sun of ancient glory going down, 
Her foes triumphant in her friends' despair : 
What w r onder should the billows overwhelm 
A bark so mann'd by Comus and his crew, 
u Youth at the prow, and Pleasure at the helm ?" — 
Yet, no ! — we will not fear ; the loathing realm 
At length has burst its chains ; a motley few, 
The pseudo-saint, the boasting infidel, 
The demagogue, and courtier, hand in hand 

No more besiege our Zion's citadel : 
But high in hope comes on this nobler band, 
For God, the sovereign, and our father-land. 



That last card, you may remember, must reckon as the 
knave; and therefore is consistently regarding an ominous 
trisyllable, which rhymes to " knavish tricks" in the national 
anthem : our suit now leads us in regular succession to the 



196 APPENDIX. 

Queen, a topic (it were Milesian to say a subject) whereon 
now, as heretofore, my loyalty shall never be found lacking. 
In old Rome's better antiquity a slave was commissioned to 
whisper counsel in the ear of triumphant generals or empe- 
rors ; and, in old England's less enlightened youth, a baubled 
fool was privileged to blurt out verities, which bearded wis- 
dom dared not hint at. Now, I boast myself free, — a citizen 
of no mean city, — my commission signed by duty — my coun- 
sel guaranteed by truth: and if, still intruding Zoilus, the 
liberality of your nature provokes you to class me truly in 
the family of fools, let your antiquarian ignorance of those 
licensed Gothamites blush at its abortive malice ; the arrow 
of your sarcasm bounds from my target blunted ; pick up 
again the harmless reed : for, not to insist upon the preva- 
lence of knaves, and their moral postponement to mere lack- 
wits, let me tell you that wise men, and good men, and shrewd 
men, were those ancient baubled fools: therefore would I 
gladly be thought of their fraternity. 

But our twelfth sonnet is waiting, save the mark! Stay: 
there ought to intervene a solemn pause ; for your Author's 
mind, on the spur of the occasion, pours forth an unpreme- 
ditated song of free-spoken, uncompromising, patriotic coun- 
sel : let its fervency atone for its presumption. 

Bold in my freedom, yet with homage meek, 

As duty prompts and loyalty commands, 
To thee, Queen of empires, would I speak. 

Behold, the most high God hath giv'n to thee 

Kingdoms and glories, might and majesty, 

Setting thee ruler over many lands ; 
Him first to serve, Monarch, wisely seek : 



AN AFTERTHOUGHT. 

And many people, nations, languages, 

Have laid their welfare in thy sovereign hands; 

Them next to bless, to prosper and to please, 

Nobly forget thyself, and thine own ease : 
Rebuke ill-counsel ; rally round thy state 
The scattered good, and true, and wise, and great : 

So Heav'n upon thee shed sweet influences ! 



And now for my Raffaellesque disguise of a vulgar baker's 
twelve, the largess muffin of Mistress Fornarina : thirteen 
cards to a suit, and thirteen to the dozen, are proverbially 
the correct thing; but, as in regular succession I have come 
upon the King card, I am free to confess — (pen, why will you 
repeat yet again such a foolish stale Joe-Millerism ?) — the 
subject a dilemma. Natheless, my good-nature shall give 
a royal chance to criticism most malign : whether candor 
acknowledge it or not, doubtless the Author's mind reigns 
dominant in the Author's book; and, notwithstanding the 
self-silence of blind Maeonic&s, (a right notable exception,) 
it holds good as a rule that the majority of original writings, 
directly or indirectly, concern a man's own self; his whims 
and his crotchets, his knowledge and his ignorance, wisdom 
and folly, experiences and suspicions therein find a place 
prepared for them. Scott's life naturally produced his earlier 
novels; in the Corsair, the Childe, and the Don, no one can 
mistake the hero-author; Southey's works, Shelley's and 
Wordsworth's, are full of adventure, feeling, and fancy, 
personal to the writers, at least equally with the sonnets of 
Petrarch or of Shakspeare. And as with instances illustrious 
as those, so with all humbler followers, the skiffs, pinnaces, 
and heavy barges in the wake of those gallant ships : an 



198 APPENDIX. 

author's library, and his friends, his hobbies and amuse- 
ments, business and pleasure, fears and wishes, accidents of 
life, and qualities of soul, all mingle in his writings with a 
harmonizing individuality ; nay, the very countenance and 
handwriting, alike with choice of subject and the style and 
method of their treatment, illustrate, in one word, the Au- 
thor's mind. These things being so, what hinders it from 
occupying, as in honesty it does, the king's place in this 
pack of sonnets? Nevertheless, forasmuch as by such occu- 
pancy an ill-tempered sarcasm might charge it with conceit ; 
know then that my humbler meaning here is to put it lowest 
and last, even in the place of wooden-spoon ; for this also 
(being mindful of the twelve apostle-spoons from old time 
antecedent) is a legitimate thirteener: and so, while in extri- 
cating my muse from the folly of serenading a non-existent 
king, I have candidly avowed the general selfishness of print- 
ing, believe that, in this avowal, I take the lowest seat, so 
well befitting one of whom it may ungraciously be asked, 
Where do fools buy their logic ? 

List, then, oh list, while generically, not individually, I 
claim for authorship 

THE CATHEDRAL MIND. 

Temple of truths most eloquently spoken, 

Shrine of sweet thoughts veiled round with words of 
power, 
The " Author's mind," in all its hallowed riches, 
Stands a Cathedral: full of precious things, — 
Tastefully built in harmonies unbroken, 

Cloister, and aisle, dark crypt, and aery tower : 
Long-treasured relics in the fretted niches, 



AN AFTERTHOUGHT. 199 

And secret stores, and heap'd-up offerings, 
Art's noblest gems, with every fruit and flower, 

Paintings and sculpture, choice imaginings, 
Its plenitude of wealth and praise betoken : 

An ever burning lamp portrays the soul ; 
Deep music all around enchantment flings ; 

And God's great Presence consecrates the whole, 



Now at length, in all verity, I have said out my say: nor 
publisher nor printer shall get more copy from me: neither, 
indeed, would it before have been the case, for all that Damas- 
tic argument, were it not that many beginnings — and you re- 
member my proverbial preliminarizing — should, for mere 
antithesis' sake, be endowed with a counterpoise of many 
endings. So, in this second parting, let me humbly suggest 
to gentle reader these : that nothing is at once more plebeian 
and unphilosophical than — censure, in a world where nothing 
can be perfect, and where apathy is held to be good-breeding ; 
item, (I am quoting Scott,) that "it is much more easy to 
destroy than to build, to criticise than to compose;" item, 
(Sir Walter again, ipsissima verba, in a letter to Miss Seward,) 
that there are certain literary " gentlemen who appear to 
be a sort of tinkers, who, unable to make pots and pans, set 
up for menders of them, and often make two holes in patch- 
ing one;" item, that in such possible cases as " exercise" 
for "exorcise," "repeat" for "repent," "depreciate" for 
" deprecate," and the like, an indifferent scribe is always at 
the mercy of compositors ; and lastly, that if it is, by very 
far, easier to read a book than to write one, it is also, by at 



200 APPENDIX. 



least as much, worthier of a noble mind to give credit for 
good intentions, rather than for bad, or indifferent, or none at 
all, even where hypercriticism may appear to prove that the 
effort itself has been a failure. 



THE END, 






LBJa'21 



X 



Just Published, Price 50 Cents. 



SCENES IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, 

OREGON, CALIFORNIA, NEW MEXICO, TEXAS 
AND THE GRAND PRAIRIES: 

OR NOTES BY THE WAY DURING AN 

EXCURSION OF THREE YEARS; 

WITH A DESCRIPTION OF THE 

COUNTRIES PASSED THROUGH, 

THEIR CURIOSITIES, SOIL, RESOURCES, PRESENT CONDITION, AND THE 
DIFFERENT NATIONS INHABITING THEM. 

BY A NEW ENGLAXDER. 

In One Large Volume. 300 pages. Second Edition. 

Opinions of the Press. 

" This book coming just now when the countries it describes occupy so 
large a share of the public attention, is exceedingly opportune, though its 
graphic delineations of life in the wilderness would render it welcome at 
any time." — N. Y. Mirror. 

"An interval of three years devoted to travel in those countries mainly 
treated of, has enabled the author to present the results of his own obser- 
vation, interspersed with statistics of valuable information and incidents of 
frequently thrilling interest 

"The value of the work in question, is greatly increased by the vast 
fund of materials contained in it that have been never before produced by 
any other writer, — materials which render its subject-matter pleasingly 
varied and strangely interesting." — Middletown Sentinel. 

" We can safely say that we have never heretofore read any work on the 
same subjects, which gave so lively a description of the countries passed 
through, or from which we elicit so much information regarding the soil, 
climate, political and social position, productions, and trade of these very 
interesting countries and their inhabitants. The work too, is interspersed 
with a great number of life-like and well told sketches of the hunter's life 
on the prairies nnd mountains of the Far West, and the tales of adventures 
with the wild Indians, the Buffalo, and other wilder inhabitants of those 
regions, will enchain the attention of the reader from beginning to end. — 
The work is written in an exceedingly pleasant style, and is evidently the 
production of a gentleman of much observation and superior judgment, 
ripened by education of the highest order." — Cincinnati Daily Times. 

"There is much information, given in a very readable style, in this fifty 
cent volume. The scenes described were in Oregon, California, New 
Mexico, Texas an^ .he Prairies, and necessarily afforded incidents of the 
most stirring kind The reader cannot fail to be interest- 
ed." — N. Y. Commercial Advertiser. 



LIBRARY FOR THE PEOPLE, 

No. 5. Price 50 Cents. 



MEMOIRS OF THE 

LIFE OF ADDISON, 

BY LUCY AIKEN. 



" Although English literature is so rich in this sort of biography, there has hitherto been 
no life of Addison, except the preface to his prose by Tickell, and the brief memoir pre- 
fixed by Johnson to his poems. This by Miss Aiken excellently supplies the deficiency. 
It will be found one of the most delightful republications of the season."— Gra- 
ham's Magazine. 

•' The talented authoress deserves credit for her research and industry for giving us such 
a valuable work "— N. Y. Herald. 

" Addison is the great fashioner of the English language. It was he who revealed all 
its hidden excellencies, both as a critic and a writer. The biography of this great author 
and most virtuous man is full of incident as striking as they are instructive.— i\ r . O. Com- 
yntrcial Advertiser. 

Just Published, Price 50 Cents. 



OUR ARMY ON THE RIO GRANDE. 

Containing an account of the March of the Army of Occupation, 
' with the particulars of 

THE ERECTION OF FORT BROWN, 

Battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, 

AND THE SURRENDER OF MATAMOROS. 
BY T. B. THORPE, 

Author of " Tom Owen, the Bee Hunter," &c. &c. 

Illustrated by 26 Engravings taken on the spot. 

Also an Edition on fine paper, with Official Reports of Battles, &c., 300 pages, 
l6mo. cloth gilt, $1 00 — or in Paper Covers, 75 cents. 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

" We do not intend to flatter Mr. Thorpe, but we believe his volume contains more in- 
formation in regard to the war than any other publication which has yet appeared, or is 
likely to appear for a long while. In addition to the narrative of events — it gives a mass 
of interesting personal anecdotes, descriptions of the country , traits of Mexican life, Sfc. <fc." 
— N. O. Picayune. 

" Most ably written and is printed and illustrated in the best style." — Planters^ Banner. 

" We feel sure that the reader will be abundantly repaid, not alone in graphic descrip- 
tion, but new matter of fact " — N. Y. Spirit of the Times. 

" Mr. Thorpe enjoyed the opportunity of personal observation immediately after the ex- 
citing scenes of which this work is the record, and gathered ample materials which he has 
wrought into an interesting and attractive volume."— N. O. Bee. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: May 2009 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



